


Paper Moon

by MayTheSixth



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Angst, Depictions of Graphic Violence, Explicit Language, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Mentions of homophobia, Mild Sexual Content, Romance, Slow Burn, Soul Eater AU, Witchcraft, inevitable fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2018-12-27 18:02:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 28,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12086394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MayTheSixth/pseuds/MayTheSixth
Summary: There were a number of lessons Baekhyun learned at the DWMA: the proper grip for a double-edged broadsword, how to sense the presence of corrupted souls lurking hundreds of meters away, the best stance to take when rushing a target in almost complete darkness. Unfortunately, no one taught him how not to fall in love with his weapon partner.No one taught him how much it would hurt either.





	1. Crush the Stars

**Author's Note:**

> A self-indulgent fic because I love EXO and I love Soul Eater and meister!Baekhyun and weapon!Chanyeol is the dream team. No prior knowledge of the Soul Eater manga or anime franchise is necessary, if I’ve explained things well enough. This is my first story I've ever posted to AO3, and I'm really excited to finally join the community.
> 
> Obligatory disclaimer: I do not own EXO or Soul Eater and all things written here are a work of fiction.
> 
> Chapter warnings: Graphic violence, mentions of homophobia

The moon was always laughing at him.

No, that wasn’t some poetic metaphor. The moon really was laughing down at Baekhyun, crescent shaped and sickly yellow with blood between its teeth. He hated the sight of it. Hated the constant croaking guffaws he felt in his bones more than heard through his ears. They made him feel mocked. Ridiculed. There he was: the skinny boy holding the enormous broadsword in a doubled-handed grip. Impossibly steady on his feet, yet the very image of someone about to tip over from the sheer weight of an object over half their height. 

The sword wasn’t heavy to him. It never was, not since the very first time Baekhyun wrapped his fingers around the enameled grip when he was twelve years old. He had laughed brightly, marveling at how such a large object could feel so feather-light in his hands. How it could feel so _right._

Of course that was because it wasn’t truly a sword at all. It was his best friend Park Chanyeol, his demon weapon partner of nearly a decade, and Baekhyun’s instrument of destruction when hunting down the condemned souls of Shinigami’s List. 

In a world where select human beings had the ability to transform into these weapons, there needed to be those that could wield them. That was Baekhyun’s task, as a meister. As Chanyeol’s meister, more specifically, and one of the few people on Earth whose soul wavelength was compatible with Chanyeol’s own. This was the key aspect of their relationship that allowed Baekhyun to wield him at all. The two boys had become partners when they were both twelve years old, shortly after the were admitted as students of the East Asia branch of the Death Weapon Meister Academy, or DWMA. It was a school designed with the single purpose of bringing together meister and weapon partners as children to hone their skills and utilize their talents on missions around the world.

Chanyeol had been all knobby knees and overlarge ears then - angry and awkward in his own skin, towering over the other students with his unusual height. He was even taller now at nineteen years old, but no longer gangly. 

Sometimes Baekhyun wished he had stayed that scrawny twelve-year-old because it had made things so much simpler between them. At least, it made it easier for Baekhyun to not be nearly as attracted to him, when every fiber of his being was screaming that Chanyeol was his best friend, and his weapon, and a man, and none of those things made for a particularly acceptable quality in a romantic partner at the East Asian branch of the DWMA.

His eyes flickered to the moon far above them again, its gaping smile resembling a sneer more than ever. Baekhyun felt is if it could see right down to the rotten depths of his core and his pathetic want for a person he could never have. Anger was a barb against his skin, the faint wash of bitterness that made him jerk his gaze away from the glowing crescent in the sky.

 _What are you spacing out for?_ Chanyeol’s voice echoed through the resonance link.

His tone was inquisitive, but not overly worried. The other boy was probably picking up the edges of irritation prickling Baekhyun’s conscious through their faintly resonating souls. As always, Chanyeol was two steps ahead of him and then two steps back. Back by his side, brushing against his consciousness with tentative fingers, sliding against his arm with a solid, comforting presence.

“I’m bored,” Baekhyun told him, adjusting his grip as he did so. He tried to keep the whine from his voice. “And the moon is particularly obnoxious tonight.”

 _Stay alert_ , Chanyeol warned. _We’re going to see activity soon_. 

“I know,” Baekhyun muttered, eager to be done with the mission. “I can sense it nearby.” 

His eyelids fluttered shut briefly, trying to focus on the sensation. Through Soul Perception he could feel the soul pulsating nearby: a vile, shifty kind of feeling that made his spine crawl. The sensation was only growing stronger, which confirmed that their target was slowly cutting a meandering path to their location.

 _Are you drawing him towards us?_ Chanyeol’s voice was a deep rumble, even in his mind.

Baekhyun scowled. 

“No.” The distant sound of a police car echoed down a nearby street. “Not consciously at least.”

Baekhyun could feel the other boy’s quiet concern pressing against his skull through their link, the evidence of a question Chanyeol didn’t want to ask. That was good, because it was a question Baekhyun didn’t want to answer. He didn’t like to think about the way their missions had been ending lately, how it seemed less like they were hunting for the souls and more like they were setting a trap for them, with Baekhyun as the bait. 

Their targets would come to them, ranting and raging about bright lights and endless hunger before trying to claw their way down to the depths of Baekhyun’s soul, to tear through his ribcage. He wasn’t sure what about it was so appealing to them, and their words were incomprehensible madness that only grew more frantic before he killed them, but the encounters always left him a bit shaken up.

The only benefit to his recent magnetic abilities to attract these corrupted souls was that their missions seemed to end faster. But Baekhyun still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off about the situation, and the uneasiness followed him all the way back to the DWMA at the close of every successful mission.

 _Maybe we should keep heading towards him_ , Chanyeol suggested, but Baekhyun was already shaking his head.

“No, I want to keep this position.” They were currently backed into the corner of alley, a spot that would make it easy to corner the target when he inevitably appeared at the entrance of the alleyway. It was dark, as dark as a street corner of Tokyo could ever be, and carried the faint sour odor of rotting garbage, but Baekhyun had not intentions of leaving until he had maneuvered their target back against the alley wall.

He could sense Chanyeol’s disgruntlement through their resonance link. They had been camped here for nearly a half hour with Chanyeol in his weapon form, even though Baekhyun knew his partner would have rather been in his human body as they waited. Baekhyun wanted to be prepared, however, and didn’t know how quickly their target would reach them once they appeared within his vicinity.

 _Can I transform back?_ Chanyeol asked, somewhat plaintively.

“Don’t,” Baekhyun said shortly. “It’s almost here. In fact…” He reached out with his senses, trying to gauge how much closer the soul had come to their position in the last few minutes. 

Inexplicably, the soul was not at all where he last remembered it.

“Wait a minute,” he breathed. “This can’t be right.”

Baekhyun’s eyes snapped open, just in time to see a shadow flit across the sickly yellow moonlight that illuminated the alleyway. He had a fleeting moment to register that Chanyeol was speaking to him before he raised an arm on instinct and something very fast and very hard slammed into him from above.

He went tumbling backwards, reacting a second after the impact to curl his body and roll back onto his feet in a single fluid motion. Something clattered to the ground next to him and he heard Chanyeol shouting his name, but his grip on his weapon didn’t falter even as he rose from his crouch to face his assailant.

“Matsuhiro Kosuke,” he greeted the figure evenly, gauging the appearance of the man that had appeared before them. 

The faint stubble on his face had been absent from the profile photograph they were provided in the mission briefing and the Japanese man looked noticeably more haggard than Baekhyun remembered, but it was unmistakably their target. Though his Soul Perception could have told him as much given the amount of vile, pulsing energy emanating of the man. Baekhyun didn’t know why Kosuke had been placed on Shinigami’s List or the crimes that had damned him, but he knew this man was guilty.

“Meister,” the man spoke finally, his eyes bloodshot as he stared at Baekhyun, unblinking.

From the corner of his eyes, Baekhyun caught the glint of a knife on the ground, the sound of it falling what he must have heard earlier as Kosuke dropped from the roofs above them. The man seemed hesitant, as if he hadn’t expected his sudden attack to fail and was now left with the decision to fight or flee. 

_Or at least left with the illusion of a decision_ , Baekhyun thought as his fingers fluttered along the handle of his sword in anticipation. There could be only one outcome to another skirmish between them, and he didn’t think it was overconfidence to know it would be this man’s defeat.

“If you know I’m a meister, you must know why I’m here,” Baekhyun told him Japanese. Kosuke didn’t answer, chest moving up and down rapidly in quick breaths, as if he’d just sprinted a long distance.

“You,” Kosuke panted, edging forward just slightly. “It’s your light.”

This man was lucid, remarkably more clear-headed than most of the targets on their recent missions. It was an opportunity Baekhyun couldn’t afford to pass up.

“What light?” he asked, stepping in a careful circle so as to keep the other man facing him.

 _Baekhyun, what are you doing?_ Chanyeol asked. _It’s dangerous to draw this out any longer._

Baekhyun ignored him, feeling Chanyeol’s frustration when he refused to answer.. “What _light_?” he repeated.

“Your soul, it’s…” Baekhyun watched the man’s fingers twitch, once. “Beckoning.”

“No. It’s not,” he replied, eyes narrowed to slits.

“I would like to taste it.”

Baekhyun laughed even as he heard Chanyeol snarl in his head. 

“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. I need my soul very much intact you see.”

Before he’d even finished speaking, the man was moving towards him with an unnatural speed. But Baekhyun had caught the shift of his feet against the cracked pavement, noticed the slight bend to his knees before he came rushing forward. His arm was already sweeping upwards, faster than the man could have ever anticipated from the small boy, and the razor sharp edge of the sword made a clean cut from the man’s hipbone to his shoulder. The force of the blow sent the Kosuke staggering backwards to hit the wall of the alley with a bruising impact. 

It took only a moment for Baekhyun’s arm to extend, the sharp tip of Chanyeol’s weapon form driving into the center of the man’s chest. It’s razor sharp blade slid through muscle and bone to connect with the solid surface of the wall behind them with the sharp ringing of metal against cement. Kosuke let out a choking gasp, a sound that quickly turned wet as his body twitched against the wall of the alley.

Baekhyun didn’t particularly like this part, but it was always easier when he didn’t think of them as people anymore. They were targets, or criminals, or sinners - any distinction other than human being suited him.

 _Baekhyun?_ He finally registered that Chanyeol was speaking to him, though his eyes stayed fixated on the body shuddering faintly at his feet. _Are you alright?_

“I think we got him,” Baekhyun announced, shifting his grip on the hilt to pull it out of the man’s chest. 

As he did, the figure in front of him reached out, hands running along the edges of the blade to push it deeper into his own chest - an awful, keening sound leaving his mouth as he did so. Baekhyun stumbled forward at the sudden tug, the unexpected force of it pulling him to his knees. Kosuke was lunging towards him instantly, clawing at the lapels of his leather jacket, but Baekhyun had already wrapped his hand around the hilt of his sword and pulled it from the other man’s flesh. It took one second more to slit his throat in a clean line and then the man’s body went still, his hands falling limp to his sides.

Baekhyun watched solemnly as the man’s body turned inky blank and collapsed inwards onto itself, the tendrils of dark matter twisting until the only thing remaining was the glowing red sphere of the man’s corrupted soul that hung in the air. It cast a crimson light on the alley, a color that stained Baekhyun’s exposed skin a deep burgundy in the darkness of the narrow space. Only the souls on Shinigami’s List would take on the scarlet hue of a condemned soul, and it was all the proof Baekhyun needed to know their target had been correct. 

Baekhyun felt his grip on Chanyeol loosen as the blinding flash of light in the alley indicated his partner was transforming back.

“What the _hell_ was that, Baekhyun?”

When his vision had adjusted to the dimness of the alley after the sudden burst of light, the meister surveyed his now-human weapon from the ground. Chanyeol stood over him, a scowl twisting his elegant features in a way Baekhyun couldn’t help but find beautiful. His weapon’s eyes were large and heavily lashed in the outer corners, a dark contrast to his wayward silver hair. There was something indescribably wild to his appearance, from the long slope of his nose to the pointed tips of his ears, and Baekhyun found himself falling deeper and deeper into Chanyeol’s lines, his edges and shadows.

“I was curious,” Baekhyun said, his voice conveying none of the turbulent nature of his thoughts. 

He suspected Chanyeol could sense something from the link, a distractedness he couldn’t explain, but hoped none of his actual intentions slipped through. The resonance link was a shaky, volatile thing between them sometimes and Baekhyun often found that he didn’t understand much of what he picked up from Chanyeol, or what he was unconsciously revealing to the other boy from his own subconscious.

“Your curiosity is going to get someone killed.”

“It just did.” Baekhyun’s smile was knifelike.

Chanyeol looked at him reproachfully. “I meant one of us.”

Baekhyun’s eye caught on a flicker of light from his peripheral vision. The soul still hovered in the air between them: a caustic, angry red orb that undulated like a small sun.

“Are you going to do something about that?” Baekhyun asked, ignoring Chanyeol’s complaints and gazing at the soul meaningfully. Chanyeol’s expression shifted slightly, as if trying to reign in some unnamed emotion, and Baekhyun felt a surge of frustration and worry pulse across the link.

He watched as Chanyeol wordlessly plucked the soul hovering in the air and swallowed it in one deft movement. Against his own will, Baekhyun’s gaze travelled to his partner’s neck and the bobbing of his defined Adam’s apple as the soul slid down Chanyeol’s throat. Baekhyun’s fingers fluttered to rest on his own neck. He felt the absence of his own Adam’s apple, as always. Not for the first time, Baekhyun wondered what it would be like to have one. More than that, he wondered what it would feel like to run his fingers over Chanyeol’s. Or maybe just Chanyeol in general. 

“What’s wrong?” Chanyeol’s deep voice was still slightly scratchy, as it sometimes was when he’d been in weapon form for a long period of time. The sound of it prickled the back of Baekhyun’s neck suggestively. “You’re staring.”

“It’s still weird seeing you do that,” Baekhyun lied. He liked to think he had mastered the art of keeping his composure around Chanyeol. Sometimes it wasn’t true. “Eating souls and all that.” 

Only demon weapons had the ability to feast on souls; in fact, they drew power from them. All but the condemned souls of Shinigami’s List were expressly forbidden from being eaten, however. Terrible things happened to demon weapons who consumed innocent souls, all of which would eventually result in the weapon’s name being added to the List in due time.

“It’s been how many years since we partnered up?” Chanyeol offered a hand to pull Baekhyun up from the ground. “Eight? And that still bothers you?”

“Seven,” Baekhyun responded immediately, perhaps a little too quickly. “We officially agreed to be partners when we were twelve, remember?” It wasn’t like he had the date pencilled into his childhood journal or anything like that.

“You say it like I could ever forget.”

Chanyeol moved to grab his arm when Baekhyun didn’t immediately take his offered hand. As he was gently pulled to his feet, Baekhyun winced slightly at the sharp jab of pain where Chanyeol’s grip pressed against a wound he didn’t know he had. 

_I must have been too distracted to notice it during the fight_ , Baekhyun thought hazily. Now that he was aware of the injury, he could feel it throbbing along the length of his arm beneath his jacket sleeve. The cloth there felt damp along his skin, a warm wetness he was almost certain was blood.

Baekhyun must have only reacted for a second, but Chanyeol’s brows snapped together in an instant. His large hand stilled immediately, then dropped from Baekhyun’s arm with a slowness that spoke of dread. The fear that pulsed through the link between them was sudden, violent.

“You’re hurt?”

Baekhyun hastily tried to maneuver his arm away from his partner. “Maybe a little. I just noticed it now, so it can’t be too bad.”

They both watched as a stark red trickle of blood leaked out the end of Baekhyun’s sleeve to drip off the long line of his fingers. Baekhyun cursed his own body for its poor timing and plastered on a smile for Chanyeol, trying to soothe the outburst he was acutely aware was coming. 

“Fuck, Baekhyun. You’re bleeding.” 

There was a familiar note of panic settling into Chanyeol’s voice, a sound Baekhyun had grown accustomed to over the years of injuries he’d sustained during their time together. This was hardly the first wound he’d ever earned in battle. And it was neither the worst nor the last. All the more reason for Chanyeol to not overreact to something he could already tell was going to be a painful annoyance rather than an actual threat to his health.

And yet, Chanyeol was staring at his arm in unabashed horror like the limb had been suddenly loped off.

“Let’s report that we finished our mission and then get back to the apartment,” Baekhyun said brusquely, trying to ignore the throbbing pain along his arm. “I can patch it up there.”

“Take off your jacket.” Chanyeol’s voice was commanding and flat. His face had gone very still, transforming his even cheekbones and sloping nose into a beautiful mask. Baekhyun could see no kind of acknowledgement for last his statement there.

“I’m okay.”

Chanyeol didn’t say anything and, for a moment, Baekhyun thought he had won. But then a large body was suddenly filling his scope of vision as Chanyeol stepped disconcertingly close and let his hands fall against Baekhyun’s chest. Before he could even think to be flustered, his jacket was being gently peeled from his skin by overlarge hands.

Baekhyun hissed as the fabric pulled at the open flesh and Chanyeol made a sympathetic sound in the back of his throat. It was too much like the coddling sound adults made to shush babies, so Baekhyun firmly decided to stay silent. He may have been short enough to pass as one, but he wasn’t a child.

Chanyeol’s face remained impassive as Baekhyun’s sleeves were finally pulled from the jacket and the night air slid along his skin like a cool blanket. He could see goosebumps dotting the flesh of his upper arm and disappearing into his t-shirt. Below that, stretching from his wrist up to his forearm to touch his elbow, was a bloody gash. Chanyeol cursed when he saw it, and they both watched the steady ooze of blood leak from the open skin. 

“I’m taking you straight to the Dispensary,” Chanyeol announced. His voice was hard, and something in Baekhyun bristled at the anger there even though it was not aimed towards him.

“I told you,” Baekhyun gritted out through clenched teeth, “I don’t need any medical treatment. I can patch this up myself.”

Sometimes they fought over things like this - stupid things, meaningless things. Those fights reminded him of when they had first met and they were all sharp elbows and sharper words. It was a time when Baekhyun was convinced Chanyeol was the last person he’d ever want to befriend, let alone partner together and live with.

It was worse when they argued now, because they knew how to hurt each other. They both understood exactly which words to use to inflict the most damage. 

Most days, Chanyeol was the one apologizing. It wasn’t that he was more cruel however. Chanyeol was just more likely to set aside the necessary pride for an “I’m sorry.” Baekhyun resented accepting defeat - be it in a battle of words or weapons - and an apology felt a little too much like setting down his sword. Like letting go of Chanyeol, and leaving them both defenseless.

“Look, the longer we argue about this, the more danger you’re in.” As expected, Chanyeol was the first to cave. Baekhyun suppressed the petty urge to smile, knowing it would only further provoke his best friend. 

But before Baekhyun could even gracefully acknowledge his success in changing his weapon’s mind, a large hand circled his wrist and suddenly Baekhyun was being pulled in the wake of a speed-walking Chanyeol. His much shorter legs struggled to keep pace as the pair made their way down the dimly lit alley. 

“Chanyeol.”

His partner didn’t so much as glance back at him.

“Hey. Chanyeol!” 

“What?” Their pace was slowing now, and Baekhyun could see that they were approaching the spot where he had parked their motorcycle earlier. 

“Can I have my jacket back at least?” Baekhyun asked obstinately. “I’m cold.”

At this, Chanyeol finally glanced back, worry clouding his expression again. Instead of simply handing the jacket back to Baekhyun, he taller boy hurriedly went about sliding his arms into the sleeves and zipping it up for him.

“Are you feeling dizzy?” he asked, and that unncessary edge of panic had reentered his voice. “How much blood have you lost?”

“I’m fine,” Baekhyun said in exasperation. “It’s just a little cold outside. You know, with it being November and all.”

They had stopped in front of the gleaming hunk of metal and tires that Chanyeol liked to call a motorcycle. Baekhyun had never been keen on learning how to drive the metal monstrosity, and always left that up to Chanyeol.

Feeling a bit warmer with his jacket settled back on his shoulders, Baekhyun slid into the second seat of the bike and patted the seat in front of him expectantly. Chanyeol gave him a pointed look but threw a leg over the bike nonetheless and settled in. As the engine hummed beneath them, breaking through the quiet of the alleyway, Baekhyun took a moment to rest his hands lightly on Chanyeol’s waist. Wordlessly, his partner steered the motorcycle out of the side street and set out on a path back to the DWMA. The clamor of Tokyo nightlife soon filled the world with sound again as they drove away from the darker corners of the city. 

The wind was playing with Baekhyun’s hair and stinging the tip of his nose with the suggestion of colder weather. But Chanyeol’s body was warm and solid in front of him, and he took the opportunity to twist his fingers tighter into the soft fabric of his sweatshirt. He felt a throb of contentment from his weapon, a warm glow caressed him through the link between them. Like this, it was easy to forget they were weapon and meister. As they sped down the brightly lit streets, he could pretend they were just two boys - no weapons or death or injury clinging to them. With his arms around Chanyeol the world always seemed a little kinder.

And a little more fragile.

Because when he was with Chanyeol like this, he wanted to believe they could have something more. He wanted to believe it even if his mind would relentlessly remind him it was all platonic, every wandering touch, every comforting muss of his hair. It was hubris to think he could somehow deserve to have Chanyeol as a friend and a lover and a partner and he had to remind himself every day that it was a near miracle to have gotten two of the three.

It wasn’t like it was taboo for meisters and weapons to date. But at the same time, it wasn’t commonplace. Even less commonplace were two male meisters and weapons dating. Being gay wasn’t taboo either but it certainly wasn’t universally accepted. Things may have been different at the other branches of the DWMA, but they were students of the East Asia branch and privy to all the cultural baggage that came along with it.

It didn’t matter in any case, because revealing his feelings for his weapon was never something he planned to do. Baekhyun didn’t want to ruin the solid partnership he and Chanyeol had built over time as the grew up together, the ease of fighting they earned over the years. And he wanted to lose Chanyeol’s friendship even less.

The longing, he let fester beneath his skin. It might never heal but he could hide it, and that was better for the both of them.

Baekhyun slowly loosened his grip and pushed away from the broad expanse of Chanyeol’s back. The sensation was oddly painful, more so than the jagged wound throbbing along his arm. It wasn’t so much a stab of pain as it was an ache that settled deep within his chest. 

In the centimeters of space between them, the chill of the night air swept through like a ghost. It carried with it memories of cruel words and disappearing figures.

Baekhyun closed his eyes.

~

“I can’t believe you’re drinking coffee at one in the morning.”

Minseok glanced up in time to see his roommate Jongdae step into the kitchen, shaking his head. His dark brown hair, usually parted down the middle, was mussed from sleep.

“I just finished it actually,” Minseok pointed out. He watched as Jongdae filled a cup with tap water from their finicky old sink. For professors at a school as prestigious as the DWMA, the staff housing was surprisingly unimpressive. “And I’ve become desensitized to the stuff anyways. Caffeine has no effect on my nervous system anymore.”

“Yes, as expected from someone who consumes more coffee a day than the average Brazilian coffee plant puts into circulation in a year,” Jongdae snarked. In one deft movement, he downed the water in the glass with a loud gulp. Much of everything Jongdae did was loud. That was just the type of person he was.

“Don’t be dumb, Jongdae. You know that’s physically impossible,” he replied primly. His roommate set the empty water glass down with a clink next to the kitchen sink. Minseok eyed it pointedly, earning an eye roll from his weapon partner.

“I’ll clean it in the morning,” Jongdae said with a yawn. As he meandered his way back down the hallway to his bedroom he tossed over his shoulder a: “You should get some sleep soon too.”

“I just need to finish grading these papers,” Minseok mumbled, but Jongdae had already disappeared through his doorway. 

He sighed into the essays he was painstakingly marking with red pen. _I probably should have told him I need him for that demonstration tomorrow_ , Minseok mused. As a meister, much of what he needed to teach in his classes he could do alone. But sometimes, it helped to have his weapon partner there, which meant dragging Jongdae into a lesson on the odd occasion. 

At twenty-one years old, Minseok was the youngest professor in the East Asian branch of the DWMA. Jongdae, being only nineteen years old, had been pushed through an accelerated course as his weapon and graduated from the DWMA alongside Minseok when he was sixteen. Fortunately, Jongdae had been able to keep up, aided by his quick wit and and naturally high resonance with Minseok’s own soul. Despite being very different in personality, the two young men understood each other and found it easy to connect in the similarities they did share. Jongdae was a little too messy for Minseok’s taste, sang obnoxiously loud in the shower, and failed to understand any of coffee’s true value. And yet, he couldn’t imagine anyone else as his partner. 

With a groan, Minseok set down his pen and gave a catlike stretch to ease the soreness of his back. He could already feel the softness of his pillow against his face. But as he stood to make his way down the hall to his bedroom, a furious knocking on the apartment door shattered the early morning silence of the living space.

He only hesitated for a moment. Minseok’s life as a meister meant more often than not facing the unexpected, and as much as his body was screaming at him to disappear beneath his covers, he knew his priorities. As he made his way to the door, the knocking didn’t stop for a second, seeming only to grow louder in volume and frequency. 

Not bothering with an obligatory peephole check, Minseok yanked open the door with perhaps more savagery than necessary. He was immediately met by the sight of a dishevelled looking Park Chanyeol, face red and chest moving up and down rapidly like he’d finished a long sprint. His dark hair was plastered to his forehead, but it did little to diminish the younger boy’s good looks. Most noticeably though, was the pure panic in his eyes.

“Minseok,” the weapon panted. “Help.”

~

When Chanyeol ran out of the Dispensary in search of someone qualified to administer medical treatment, Baekhyun resolved to patch up his arm alone before he came back. In a matter of minutes he’d downed two painkillers, rummaged through three different drawers, and found a suitable length of gauze and medical tape. He was, however, distracted rather soon by the clean white sheets of one of the hospital-style beds of the infirmary. 

He told himself he’d only take a moment to lie down. Just a moment, and then he’d have his arm bandaged before Chanyeol returned with whatever teacher was up at this ungodly hour. 

Too easily, the heavy fog of sleep overtook him.

In a state of half-consciousness, Baekhyun distantly heard the squeak of unoiled hinges and the murmur of low voices. He recognized Chanyeol’s deep timbre immediately and maybe… Minseok’s? It was too much effort to open his eyes to check. His arm didn’t hurt anymore.

There was a loud exclamation. That sounded like Chanyeol. Footsteps squeaked against the tile floor and he might have heard his name. He felt a pressure against his neck, then his forehead. His bangs tickled his skin when they fell back into place.

There was a different person touching him now, cool fingertips against his skin. They had small hands, not like Chanyeol. Chanyeol had large hands, rough hands, hands with raised veins and thick digits. Something was stinging his arm now. It hurt again.

“...not too serious.” Words were slipping in and out of his consciousness. It did sound more and more like Minseok now. “Panicked… was worried. Why… always overreact?” 

“... lots of blood.” A sigh of relief. “Thank you.”

The pressure lifted from his arm, but it felt constrained somehow. Baekhyun let out whine of annoyance.

“...definitely asleep.” That was Chanyeol. “I’ll… tonight.”

“That’s fine.” Some other words. Did they matter? Sleep mattered more.

Baekhyun thought he heard the door squeak shut again behind one set of footsteps. Then the hand against his forehead returned and his bed shifted suddenly. On some level of consciousness, he understood he was safe now, secure next to a comforting presence. He let the darkness of sleep overtake him completely to the sound of low murmurs above him. 

~

When Minseok finally left the Dispensary, a sudden wave of exhaustion hit Chanyeol. He sank onto the thin mattress of Baekhyun’s hospital bed, feeling the hectic events of the night catching up to him. More than that, he felt emotionally wrecked. The rush of adrenaline from battle had transformed from the thrill of their success, to fear when he realized Baekhyun was injured, finally to settle on unadulterated relief. 

He gazed down at the source of his troubles, and his happiness. Baekhyun looked small, impossibly small and thin buried beneath a pile of white sheets. His black hair was stark against the snowy color, his skin pale from exhaustion and injury. Almost unconsciously, Chanyeol reached a hand out to brush Baekhyun’s wayward bangs from his eyes. The hair was silky against his skin. He wanted to bury his face in it and breath Baekhyun in until everything was right again.

Baekhyun wasn’t weak, Chanyeol knew that. He wasn’t fragile. His meister was strong, remarkably talented, and more than a match for most enemies they’d ever faced. But sometimes that was hard to acknowledge when they were away from the battlefield and Baekhyun was lying there small and unguarded in his sleep. It was part of his nature as a weapon, he’d come to learn, to be needlessly protective over a person that in most cases could function just as well without him.

This hadn’t been a serious injury, and on some level, Chanyeol realized he’d been aware of that fact all along. But logic rarely factored into his emotions when Baekhyun was involved. 

It was strange sometimes, feeling such strong protective urges about someone who could knock a grown man on his back in two seconds flat. But Baekhyun was always a contradiction: quick-witted in battle, but a terrible test-taker. Strong enough to wield Chanyeol in weapon form one-handed yet unable to open jar lids without assistance. Mentally connected to Chanyeol through their resonance link as weapon and meister, but completely unaware of his feelings. 

Feelings a weapon shouldn’t have for their meister. It was a longing, an ache deep-rooted in his chest that only grew more and more painful as time went on. Baekhyun had latched onto him there seven years ago when they first agreed to be partners. And slowly but surely, through each battle, and each heated argument, and each late night conversation, the small boy dug himself deeper. Sometimes Baekhyun made him impossibly happy, other times, furious. When their skin would brush, he was flustered. When Baekhyun laughed at his terrible jokes, Chanyeol wanted to hug him so hard it was physically painful to restrain himself. Baekhyun was light. He was a bright glow against the darkness that had settled on the world and Chanyeol would do anything to make it so that he would never go out.

Baekhyun shifted suddenly in his sleep, turning so that his back was facing him. With his face now obscured, Chanyeol could only stare at the smooth skin of his meister’s neck peeking out from the covers.

_I’m in love with him._

It wasn’t the first time Chanyeol had ever had the thought. 

It seemed to hurt more tonight though.


	2. Recrudescence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um… thank you so, so much to everyone that gave such lovely feedback on Chapter 1. I realize this is kind of a niche AU so I wasn’t expecting such a supportive response and it made me happier than you can know. Onwards to Chapter 2!

Minseok rose early to visit the Dispensary and check on Baekhyun only to find the tiny meister peacefully curled on his side in the infirmary bed, still sound asleep. Chanyeol was slumped over the end of the mattress with his head in his arms, breath falling in unison with his partner. The picture of them made Minseok smile, a little, even as he rubbed the sleep out of his own eyes.

Unfortunately, his brief excursion gave him just enough time to run back to his apartment, yell at Jongdae that they needed to leave _now_ for his lecture, before haphazardly filling his tumbler with coffee, grabbing the stack of graded papers, and dragging his somewhat befuddled weapon out the door. Minseok could feel his glasses sitting crookedly on his face and the collar of his sweater was loose enough that it kept slipping down to expose his shoulder, but his grip on Jongdae’s wrist remained firm as they cut a line towards his lecture hall through the twisting hallways of the Academy. 

Minseok thought they were going to make it to his classroom without further incident, but a commotion in the main hall slowed their progress to a shuffle. He tried to slip past the group of loud, mostly female students forming a cluster near the assignment board for ongoing missions but suddenly the crowd was pushing directly towards him and he was forcefully shoved to the side. In an instant, he hit the floor as the papers in his arms spilled onto the ground around him.

“Minseok!” Jongdae crouched down immediately to run his hands along his body, searching for an injury that didn’t exist. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” he mumbled in reply, red-faced and fumbling to pick up the fallen papers. His coffee had miraculously remained upright but the students around him were paying little heed to the papers on the floor and he watched in horror as one student stepped on a carefully marked essay with a grubby-looking sneaker.

Jongdae had already risen to stand upright, and Minseok could hear him declaring loud warnings to the people around him, much to his further embarrassment. He kept his head down, dodging stomping feet and scrabbling to grab papers, not caring for whichever direction they fell in the stack in his hands.

He didn’t look up, but the squeals around him were growing louder and had reached a near crescendo when he sensed a figure crouch next to him.

“Here you go.” A hand was suddenly offering him a neat stack of fallen essays.

Minseok took them with a grateful bow of his head, glasses slipping further down his nose as he did so. “Thank you-” 

His words cut off when a faint recognition crawled up his spine, the memory of a voice he hadn’t heard in person for more than two years. The pieces started to fall in place then: the excitement in the main hall, the sheer number of female onlookers gathered in crowd, the light, even tones of his helper’s voice that could only point to one person.

Lu Han.

When he looked up, the dark, long-lashed eyes that locked onto his with frightening precision were all the confirmation he needed for his suspicions. Lu Han looked effortlessly polished in a long overcoat and dark denim jeans, the outfit so carefully put together Minseok doubted he’d just returned from a mission. Then again, this was Lu Han, and vanity almost always preceded practicality on his list of priorities. 

He watched Lu Han casually rake his fingers through his auburn hair, looking needlessly pleased with himself as he did so. The strands fell back against his head like liquid silk in an arrangement Minseok couldn’t achieve if he spent an hour running products through his own stick straight hair. 

In that moment, the meister wanted nothing more than to grab Jongdae and flee from the grand hall as fast as he frustratingly short legs would take him. Instead he turned his attention back to gathering the last few sheets of paper, mouth pressed into a hard line.

“Why are you back?” Minseok asked the other meister flatly, gaze averted.

Lu Han laughed, the ringing sound of it bright and effervescent in the din of the open room. It sent the suffocating swarm of girls around them into fits of giggles and Minseok felt a headache growing at the sheer volume of it all, though he wasn’t sure which party to blame.

“I think I liked this conversation better when it started with ‘Thank you,’” Lu Han told him. Minseok could hear the smile in his voice though he refused to look up.

“I think I liked this conversation better when it wasn’t happening,” Minseok muttered. He thought it was low enough to pass undetected but Lu Han’s delighted laugh confirmed otherwise. _Damn uncanny hearing abilities._

“Oh, Minseok, I missed you,” Lu Han said. Minseok glanced up then to see the other meister smiling down at him with a gentleness that made him want to pour his coffee all over Lu Han’s expensive loafers.

“The feeling isn’t mutual.” 

It was almost surprising hearing the words he was thinking echoed in someone else’s voice, but not so surprising when he realized it was Jongdae who had spoken. His weapon partner helped him stand with a hand in the crook of Minseok’s elbow before turning to face Lu Han with an icy gaze.

“Kim Jongdae, I see you’re as nosy as ever.” Lu Han’s voice went noticeably colder at Jongdae’s appearance, his smile a little more forced. 

“Why did you come back, Lu Han?” Jongdae asked, face still a stone mask.

“Australia bored me.” Lu Han’s grin was all teeth. 

Minseok shifted the stack of papers in his hand uncomfortably, the wide collar of his sweater moving as he did so, and he felt the cold brush of air against his shoulder once again as the knitted fabric slipped off of it. He mentally cursed the article of clothing, and Jongdae as well, because he had a sneaking suspicion the other boy had stretched it out in the laundry.

Lu Han’s eyes flickered to his exposed shoulder, gaze suddenly unreadable, and Minseok resisted the urge to pull his sweater up self-consciously. Next to him, he felt Jongdae tense and winced at the sudden barrage anger that rolled off his weapon through their link.

“Also, I missed Minseok,” Lu Han finished, and there wasn’t enough humor in his voice for Minseok to meet his pointed gaze.

“We fulfilled our mission at the Oceania branch and were given the opportunity to come home,” a familiar voice cut in. 

Minseok retreated backwards slightly when a figure stepped from the crowd behind Lu Han, a man with sleepy eyes and dimple set into his unsmiling face that he immediately recognized as Zhang Yixing. 

“So we took it.”

“‘Xing! I thought I lost you in the crowd,” Lu Han said, throwing an arm carelessly over his weapon’s shoulder. Yixing’s face remained impassive.

“No, you didn’t.” Minseok wasn’t quite sure exactly what about Lu Han’s statement Yixing was denying but his meister looked amused by his weapon’s rejection nonetheless.

When Yixing’s eyes flickered to Minseok he nodded a careful greeting, which the weapon returned stoically. Minseok had never been fond of any of Lu Han’s friends, or any of the classmates he’d grown up with in general, but Yixing was a near exception. The younger man was too withdrawn to warrant either strong dislike or like from Minseok and so the two of them stayed safely acquaintances. At times it felt like Yixing was simply Lu Han’s shadow, a dark presence that followed him wherever he stepped and disappeared under bright lights and attention.

“We’re going to be late to your class,” Jongdae warned. Minseok watched as Yixing’s gaze moved away from him to lock on Jongdae instead. An unnamed emotion shuttered across the other man’s expression before his face returned to the handsome, dull-eyed mask that was typical of him. Lu Han glanced almost imperceptibly towards his weapon partner, poorly masked surprise in his eyes.

Minseok eased closer to Jongdae, uneasy. “I know, let’s go.”

“That’s right, Professor Minseok, isn’t it?” Lu Han asked, his eyes fixing on the meister once more.

“Professor Kim,” Minseok corrected automatically, then cursed himself when he noticed the smile spreading across Lu Han’s face at his response.

“Professor Kim,” the other meister echoed. “We’ll have to stop in on one of your classes some day, now that we’re back.”

“Don’t bother,” Jongdae snapped back. Minseok rested a careful hand on his weapon’s upper arm, a silent gesture to calm him down.

“I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you in any way,” Minseok said sweetly. “It’s fine.”

“It’s no-” Lu Han began but the professor felt himself being pulled away by Jongdae’s hand in the crook of his arm, something he surrendered himself to with relief.

“Bye, Yixing,” he called backwards. “Have a nice day.” As he turned away the last glimpse he caught was Lu Han frowning as the crowd swallowed him up again.

Jongdae still hadn’t let go of his arm even after they entered the much less densely populated hallway leading to Minseok’s classroom.

“Was that last comment too petty?” he asked his weapon.

“No,” Jongdae said shortly. Minseok could still feel anger rolling off him, sharp and acrid in the link between him.

“Hey,” he said gently. “Are you okay?”

“Has Lu Han always looked at you like that?” Jongdae’s voice was strange, but Minseok didn’t turn back to glance at him. The fact that his weapon had ignored his previous question didn’t go unnoticed to him.

“Like what?”

“Like he wants to eat you.”

Minseok shifted uneasily. “Well, he’s always been a bully.”

A prolonged pause settled between them. “That’s not what I mean.”

Minseok would have asked him what he did mean but by this time the two men had reached the lecture hall and all his attention was focused on trying to open the solid oak double doors while still keeping his hold on the stack of papers and precariously tipping coffee cup. He gave Jongdae a grateful smile when his weapon stepped forward to open the door for him. Jongdae’s returning smile was tight, but that was something Minseok resolved to think about later.

He would have preferred to think about Lu Han later as well - or maybe never - but Minseok couldn’t seem wipe the image of his teasing grin from the backs of his eyelids. 

It had been two long years since he’d last seen him. That should have been more than enough time to let go of childhood grudges and the lingering confusion over the disastrous event of five years ago. He’d spent a full seven-hundred and thirty days away from Lu Han and his blinding smile, and his soft laugh, and the infuriating way he drew people to him like an unusually bright light in nest of dirty gray moths.

It had been two long years since he’d last seen him. And somehow, it still hadn’t been long enough.

~

Lu Han wasn’t sure how he spotted him, in the mix of all the people pressing against him. It was as if one moment he was smiling mechanically, looking over the sea of admiring faces for an escape, and the next moment all he could see was a dark pair of cat-like eyes and crooked glasses slipping off a delicate nose.

Minseok.

His feet were moving forward instantly, pulling him through the crowd before he could make a conscious decision to move. He could feel Yixing’s silent curiosity pulsing through the link, but his demon weapon partner followed him through the masses of people nonetheless. Such was the nature of their partnership: Lu Han running headlong into situations without thinking of the consequences and Yixing following to pull him out when things inevitably went wrong.

As Lu Han watched Minseok’s papers spill onto the floor as he was violently shoved to the ground, he realized things were about to go very wrong indeed. And he didn’t have the willpower to step back. Not when Minseok was scrabbling across the floor looking frighteningly small against the masses of bodies towering above him. 

His inky black hair fell into his eyes as he leaned forward, the dark strands obscuring their almond shape. Minseok’s bangs were longer than Lu Han remembered. They completely covered his forehead now and it somehow made him younger, younger than his already deceptive age. Maybe it was their time apart clouding his judgement, but seeing him in the mundane environment of the grand hall made him realize just how breathtaking he was. 

It was pure adrenaline that had him reaching down to grab a handful of fallen papers. He wondered if Minseok would notice the pulse pounding in his wrist as he extended his hand, the papers a white peace offering for a war he had never really felt like fighting.

Lu Han had only a moment to question if Minseok had softened to him in their two years apart. In the spare few seconds between his first words to the other meister and Minseok’s recognition of his voice, he took the time to hope something had changed.

He saw Minseok freeze, his shoulders tensing as he identified Lu Han’s slightly accented Korean, and he bit back the utter wave of disappointment at the sight. He recognized the tightening of muscles in a way only a meister could - Minseok was steeling himself for a fight, every sharp line of his body screamed hostility even with his gaze averted.

It wasn’t unexpected, which made it easier for Lu Han to slip on his signature smirk and keep his voice from wavering as they began their banter. But he still felt the rejection like an abrasion against his skin: rough and pebbled and just painful enough to be noticeable. Only when Minseok eventually turned his eyes upwards to meet his own was Lu Han able to forget the sting, because the reality finally hit him that he was back and he would get to see the other meister in person again and pictures had never really done Minseok’s face justice.

Too soon, their conversation was over and Minseok was being pulled away without so much as a backwards glance in his direction. It hurt, more than he’d ever admit, but he quickly forced a smile on his face as he was once again swarmed by the students and colleagues around him. 

“I think that went rather well,” Lu Han said brightly once he and Yixing had broken away from the throng of admirers and well-wishers welcoming them back. The pair were now making their way towards the center of the Academy, on the course they’d initially set out for when they left their apartment this morning.

“No you don’t,” Yixing said flatly.

“I really don’t,” Lu Han agreed immediately. “Why do I pretend like I can hide things from you again?”

“Why do you continue to act like an ass in front of Minseok when you know he hates it?” his weapon countered.

“It’s what he expects,” Lu Han replied after a long moment, a deceptive lightness to his tone. He scuffed the panelled floor of the hallway with one leather loafer. “There’s a delicate balance to our relationship right now and I’m afraid that if I tip it any one direction I will lose him completely. At least when we banter back and forth he isn’t ignoring me.”

“You’re remarkably stupid, for someone who prides himself in being one of the best meisters in the Eastern Hemisphere.”

“Stupid has nothing to do with it.” Lu Han stretched, catlike, as he squinted against the sunlight that was filtering in through the panes of the hallway windows. “Is it too early for a nap?”

“We’re going to see the headmaster now, and I won’t let you weasel your way out of it this time like you did back in Australia,” Yixing told him firmly.

“You’re looking forward to this, aren’t you?” Lu Han asked sullenly as they continued on down the hall. “I can’t believe you admire the guy.”

“I admire hard work and extraordinary foresight.”

“He’s manipulative and callous, ‘Xing. Being smart doesn’t absolve him of that.”

They stopped behind the set of _shoji_ doors leading to the headmaster’s office, Yixing’s hand hovering poised to knock against the wooden frame as he turned to look at Lu Han seriously. There was pity in his gaze, and sadness. And beneath it all, an understanding Lu Han didn’t think he’d find reflected in the eyes of anyone else in the entire world.

“And you aren’t?”

Lu Han looked away.

~

Kim Junmyeon wasn’t an insubordinate person by nature.

He wasn’t particularly argumentative either. In fact, he usually acted as the peacemaker in the mostly harmless skirmishes that would occasionally break out amongst his groups of friends. He followed the rules with a preciseness that sometimes frustrated his peers, especially his weapon Wu Yifan, but he’d never really suffered for it.

He was suffering now.

“Junmyeon.”

Kim Young Min’s hands were folded atop the dark surface of his massive mahogany desk. It was glaringly out of place amongst the mix of otherwise Edo era Japanese furniture that decorated much of the surface of the headmaster’s office. The further into the DWMA one travelled, the more traditionally Japanese the architecture became. By the time the Young Min’s office was reached the walls were replaced by elaborate hand-painted _fusuma_ panels that stretched from ceiling to polished floor. 

The crystalline chandelier painting a yellow glow over the walls of the space really had no right to be there either, nor did the oversized velvet armchair Junmyeon was currently sitting in. Yifan had opted to stand instead, and the meister could feel his hands gripping the back of his chair. His weapon was tense; Junmyeon sensed the anger and suspicion rolling off him in waves along the link between them. Yifan was making no means to hide it then. He wanted Junmyeon to know exactly what he was thinking.

“There’s been a number of strange disappearances in Jeonju we need you to look into. It could just be another corrupted soul to strike off the List but we have reason to believe there may be rouge witch involved. She’s thought to be acting outside the boundaries of the Treaty, and we need you to investigate,” Young Min told them, his voice as casual as if he was relaying the neighbourhood gossip to the two other men.

“A rogue witch?” Junmyeon tried to keep the incredulity from his voice. “And you want us to go in alone and confront her? I admire your confidence in our abilities sir, but I’m not sure we’ve earned it.”

“It’s reconnaissance only. This could be nothing, and we don’t want to rush things as they are.” Something about the headmaster’s tone made it hard for Junmyeon to trust that the man believed his own derision. 

Seeing Junmyeon’s obvious hesitation, Young Min waved a dismissive hand. “You’re welcome to take along another weapon if you’d like some backup. But it’s highly recommended you don’t engage with the witch unless absolutely necessary.”

Junmyeon glanced back towards his weapon, a question in his gaze. “What do you think?”

Yifan shrugged. “I don’t expect that it’ll be a problem for us.”

“Confidence is instrumental in circumstances such as this,” the headmaster said. It was the closest the man had gotten to acknowledging Yifan’s presence since they pair of them had entered the office, and Junmyeon felt his irritation grow.

The fact of the matter was, Junmyeon was confident. But overconfidence was a surefire way to be killed in the world of meisters and weapons and he hadn’t lived to be twenty years old without the necessary amount of caution in his tread.

“You’re still in the position to be the next headmaster of the East Asian Branch when I step down,” Young Min continued. “I will guide you as best I can, but my tutelage can only take you so far. How you perform on missions is outside of my control, but it will inevitably be part of your evaluation.”

“With all due respect sir,” Yifan said, voice as cold as Junmyeon had ever heard it. “We’ve never underperformed on field missions. It’s the reason you took an interest in us in the first place.”

“Yifan,” Junmyeon warned. He felt some of his weapon’s anger subside at the sound of his voice, and another part of it extend towards him in a belligerent tendril.

“I’m well aware of your skills,” Young Min answered cooly. He didn’t so much as glance up at Yifan, keeping his gaze fixed on Junmyeon instead. The meister bristled at the obvious snub to his weapon, knuckles whitening along the polished arm of his chair. “But with the treaty with the witches in place you must find a way to stand out from the masses of potential candidates, without a Death Scythe.”

 _I’ll bite_ , Junmyeon thought. “Of course, sir. We’ll accept the mission and do our best to perform to a high level under your guidance.” He bowed his neck in a display of reverence he hoped wasn’t too exaggerated.

“I’m glad to hear that.” Young Min clapped, loudly, but neither boy flinched at the sudden sound of it. “Unfortunately, we’ll have to cut this short as I have another meeting scheduled soon. I’m glad we got the chance to talk.”

Junmyeon rose from his seat, glad for the dismissal. “Us as well. We’ll pick the mission assignment today and leave for Jeonju tomorrow.”

With a final bow from Junmyeon and Yifan’s slight dip of the neck he hoped looked close enough to pass as one, both men left. It wasn’t until they were alone in the antechamber outside of the office did his weapon finally speak.

“I hate him,” Yifan said flatly. “He always treats weapons as a means to an end. Azusa would have never stood for it.”

“I miss when Azusa was headmistress,” Junmyeon agreed. Azusa Yumi had been a Death Scythe, one of the few living individuals in the world to have earned the title, and a gun-type weapon like Yifan. She hadn’t been the most personable of leaders but she was whip-smart, and perhaps most importantly, fair. “But she’s not here any longer, and our only alternative is to put up with Young Min in the meantime.”

“I won’t eat out of his hand like a dog, Myeon,” Yifan told him. There was no sting to his words, just an honest refusal. Junmyeon had always liked that about the other man.

The meister stretched up on his tiptoes to press a chaste kiss against Yifan’s mouth. 

“I know,” he replied once he had pulled away. “But it doesn’t hurt to play along for now.”

Yifan’s face had softened remarkably after the kiss, and the sudden swell of what Junmyeon had long since come to recognize as love through their link made his face warm. He stood still as his weapon reached out to twine their fingers together wordlessly. Junmyeon’s hands looked as small as a child’s against the massive expanse of Yifan’s palm. Not for the first time, he marveled at how such an enormous person could transform into the not nearly as long silhouette of a triple barrel shotgun.

His ruminations were interrupted by the sound of a door sliding open, and he startled as two familiar figures appeared in the entrance of the antechamber when the panels parted. Junmyeon pulled his hand from Yifan’s fingers immediately, his own panic barely masking the exasperation he felt from his weapon at the action.

“Lu Han, Yixing!” Junmyeon’s laugh was breathy, forced, as he greeted the pair. “When did you get back?”

“Our flight got in late last night.” Lu Han, unsurprisingly, was the one to speak. The meister was smiling while Yixing’s face remained carefully blank, neither of which was particularly helpful in deciphering their reactions because those were their default expressions more often than not. “I take it you knew we were being transferred to Tokyo?”

Junmyeon nodded. “The chairman told us a few weeks ago,” he answered carefully. 

For what exactly, Young Min had not been clear, but the meister anticipated that the truth would come out in due time.

“Young Min must trust you two a lot,” Lu Han said. A rather uncanny smile was still plastered onto his face, its toothiness only mildly unsettling. In any case, it was proof enough that Lu Han’s less than favorable opinion of the chairman hadn’t changed in the two years he spent away from the East Asia headquarters.

“He trusts Junmyeon,” Yifan said, finally breaking his silence. “And he thinks I’m harmless enough to allow listen in.”

Lu Han said something in Mandarin then, too fast for Junmyeon to properly decipher, though his Mandarin comprehension was admittedly subpar at best. He’d picked up some of the language simply from the sheer amount of time he spent with his weapon, but his fluency wasn’t nearly as high as Yifan’s was in Korean.

“Careful there,” Yifan answered with a dark laugh.

“Lu Han, it wouldn’t be wise to keep the headmaster waiting,” Yixing interrupted. Junmyeon couldn’t tell if he was frowning because of Lu Han’s words or the delay.

The Chinese meister sighed. “Alright, let’s get this over with. See you around Yifan, Junmyeon.”

Only when the two other men had disappeared through the sliding doors leading to Young Min’s office did Junmyeon turn to face his weapon. 

“What did Lu Han say to you?” he asked. 

“It was just an old Chinese proverb,” his weapon replied, gaze unreadable.

“What proverb?”

Yifan shifted slightly to look down at him, his thumb brushing the length of Junmyeon’s chin to tilt his head upwards.

“It is easy to dodge a spear from the front, but hard to avoid an arrow from behind,” he recited.

“That sounds like a threat,” the meister said uneasily.

Yifan glanced behind them where the soft murmur of voices could now be heard from headmaster’s office. 

“I think that’s because it is.”

~

Baekhyun woke to the feeling of unfamiliar sheets against his skin and an uncomfortable pressure along the length of his arm. He sat up groggily, taking in the cold antiseptic walls of the Dispensary as the events of last night slowly trickled back into his conscious memory.

A head of unruly silver hair was the only recognizable feature he could make out of Chanyeol from the weapon’s twisted position at the end of his mattress. It couldn’t have been comfortable for him to fall asleep there, hunched over the edge of the infirmary bed as he was, and something in Baekhyun twinged at the realization.

His weapon partner stirred then, and Baekhyun felt through the sudden clarity in the link between them that the other boy was waking up. Chanyeol unfolded slowly to face him, arm reaching out blindly to feel the lumpy form of Baekhyun’s ankle beneath the sheets as if searching for the physical proof that he was still there.

“Morning,” Baekhyun greeted him. His weapon turned to face him, eyes squinting against the bright fluorescent lights of the infirmary.

“Hey,” Chanyeol mumbled. His voice was lower than it had any right to be. “You sleep okay?”

“Yeah.” Baekhyun’s own voice was thin from sleep and disuse, and the roof of his mouth was bone dry when he spoke. He didn’t know if Chanyeol could feel it, somewhere along there resonance link, or if his partner was just extremely attentive, because a glass of water was quickly being placed into the hand attached to his uninjured arm. Baekhyun glanced up at him gratefully, but Chanyeol was inspecting the wrappings of his wound, gaze averted.

“How does your arm feel?”

“It’s alright. I should be in good enough shape for another mission tonight, if there’s anything available,” he told his weapon, watching the way the tips of Chanyeol’s bangs brushed his eyelashes as his head hung over the bed.

But Chanyeol looked up then, his gaze reproachful as his eyes met Baekhyun’s. 

“I hope you’re joking,” the weapon said darkly. Baekhyun remained tactfully silent.

The bandages were stifling against his arm, and curiosity at the breadth of the wound had him digging his fingernails under the gauze in an attempt to see the edges of the cut. He heard Chanyeol give a muffled sound of disapproval at the action.

“Don’t touch it.” Chanyeol’s voice was stern, but the hand that pushed his wandering fingers away from the bandages was featherlight. Baekhyun never quite understood how Chanyeol managed to be so gentle with him when he was razor sharp in weapon form and almost self-destructively clumsy as a human.

“It itches,” he protested faintly, but his fingers dropped to his sides nonetheless.

“The cut is long, but it’s not too deep. Minseok thinks you should be fine to start missions again in a few days.” With a final tuck the bandage was fixed back in place and Chanyeol drew away from him. “But you need to careful in the meantime.”

“I’m fine now.” Baekhyun swung his legs over the side of the bed, feeling slightly dizzy as he did so. His hand reached out reflexively to find support against Chanyeol’s bicep. The skin there was warm as he curled his fingers against the swollen muscle, something he took a strange kind of comfort in.

“You’re as white as your hospital sheets and the wound is still oozing blood. You’re not fine,” Chanyeol said firmly. His hand had risen automatically to press against the small of Baekhyun’s back when his balance failed him and Baekhyun simultaneously wanted to push him away and feel Chanyeol’s hand drop lower against his skin.

Instead, he shook him off and loosened his grip on the solid muscle of Chanyeol’s bicep. Something about the absence of his skin against Chanyeol’s hurt more than the throbbing gash along his arm.

“I _am_ fine, and I’m ready for a new assignment,” Baekhyun said firmly, already walking towards the door with quick strides.

“Baekhyun.”

Chanyeol’s voice always dropped an octave when he was angry, and it was seafloor bottom deep as Baekhyun felt a large hand wrap around his uninjured forearm, holding him in place.

“What?” He turned slowly to face his weapon. 

“We are not taking another mission until these bandages come off. I know you like to be obstinate and overly independent, but I’m not budging from this.”

The atmosphere between them was suffocating, and Baekhyun felt like he could drown under the amount of worry, frustration, and whatever unnamed emotion of Chanyeol’s that was assaulting him from across their resonance link. He needed to dispel it, and quickly, before he said something he’d regret.

“Where’s my jacket?” Baekhyun asked. Chanyeol dropped his arm, and the tension between them fell along with it, to Baekhyun’s uneasy mixture of relief and disappointment. 

“Minseok took it. The thing was covered and blood so I guess he wanted to wash it.”

Baekhyun pinched the low bridge of his nose. “That sounds like Minseok.” 

The professor was an infamously tidy, something he’d heard his fair of complaints about from their mutual friend Jongdae. Unfortunately, this now meant Baekhyun couldn’t hide the masses of white bandages covering the length of his arm and stop the curious stares that were sure to accompany them as they left the Dispensary.

They headed off down the hall, Baekhyun in the lead with Chanyeol just a half step behind. His weapon almost always let him set the pace, despite the striking difference in the size of their stride lengths, but Baekhyun was never quite sure if it was a conscious or unconscious courtesy on Chanyeol’s part.

After reporting the completion of their last assignment, Baekhyun couldn’t help but drag Chanyeol over to the mission board, a stretch of wall covered with various assignments for students and graduates alike to take based their rank at the DWMA. As a three-star meister, the highest ranking possible, Baekhyun usually had his pick of the various quests. His hand itched now to pull one off the wall.

“Don’t even think about it,” Chanyeol told him, hand coming down firmly to grip the shoulder of his uninjured arm.

Before he could reply, Baekhyun caught a pair of partners watching the two of them just an arm’s length away in front of the mission board. He started when he realized it was Kim Junmyeon and his weapon Wu Yifan, one of the more famous duos on campus and the only partnership to boast a perfect record throughout the long list of missions they had completed. 

Junmyeon had the clean, classically-cut good looks of politician’s son while Yifan was blessed with the languid beauty of a runway model, though none of the grace. They were memorable, the two men, be it because of their striking appearance or the legacy their names carried at the DWMA. Despite Junmyeon’s frequent attempts at friendliness there seemed to be an insurmountable wall between them and most of the other students. Even Baekhyun was acutely aware what a separate class of meister and weapon Junmyeon and Yifan were.

“Last’s night’s mission get a little rough?” the other meister asked by way of greeting.

There was something strangely maternal about Junmyeon and the way he would dote on underclassmen and upperclassmen indiscriminately. His gaze was sympathetic now as he took in the bandages wrapping Baekhyun’s arm.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said, shifting slightly to try and hide the incriminating limb behind his back.

“Baekhyun’s out of commission for a few days,” Chanyeol explained.“And he’s not too happy about it.”

“I suppose that means Chanyeol is free then, aren’t you?” Junmyeon looked thoughtful, and Yifan was side-eyeing his meister, neither of which was typically a good sign of what words were about to follow.

Kim Junmyeon was a Utility Meister, which meant he had the very rare and very valuable ability to resonate with more than one wavelength of a demon weapon. So while Yifan was his long-time weapon partner, Baekhyun had seen Junmyeon wield every type of weapon: from swords to scythes to _shurikans_. He could resonate with all of them, though his strongest connection was, and always had been, with Yifan.

They were a strange sight together, the pair of them, be it in weapon or human form. If it wasn’t their staggering height difference that pulled stares, it was the way Junmyeon could hoist the enormous shotgun on his shoulder like it was as light as a paperweight.

“Well, I’d like to be able to look after Baekhyun while he’s recovering,” Chanyeol said after a slight pause, as if sensing the direction of where this conversation was going and trying to prolong the inevitable.

“So I suppose you wouldn’t be up for tagging along on our next mission then?” Junmyeon asked, looking slightly disappointed. He sighed. “There’s another option to rule out.”

“What mission?” Baekhyun asked, even as Chanyeol shook his head regretfully in response.

“We’re heading to South Korea for reconnaissance on a potential violation of the Treaty,” Yifan explained, voice dropping slightly in volume. A violation of the Treaty could only mean one thing: there was a rogue witch on the loose. A woman with incredible power who wasn’t keen on following the rules set down by the elites of the DWMA after the decisive war between witch and meister of the last decade.

“South Korea, really?” Baekhyun said after a moment. An idea struck him. “Chanyeol, maybe you could visit your family while you’re back.”

“I already told you, I’m not going.” His weapon turned to the other pair apologetically. “No offense to either of you.”

“Well you sure as hell aren’t staying here to play nurse for me,” Baekhyun snapped. “I’m not bedridden, Chanyeol. I have a long scratch.”

His weapon’s dark eyes flashed. “It’s not-!”

“How long do you expect the assignment to last?” Baekhyun asked, cutting off Chanyeol’s protestations. He felt only slightly guilty at the surge of irritation through the link.

“If it’s longer than three days, we’ve gotten ourselves into serious trouble,” Yifan said.

Baekhyun turned to face his partner. “Three days. I’ll be fine for three days. And you’ll be doing a lot more good helping with reconnaissance than fussing over me for that long.”

He felt an unexpected flicker of uncertainty from Chanyeol, an almost inexplicable hurt, but his weapon’s expression didn’t change.

 _I’m not trying to chase you away, Yeol_ , Baekhyun thought. In actuality, he would have liked to keep his weapon close as he recovered. Chanyeol had the rather uncanny ability to cheer him up when he was in pain and feeling useless, a skill the weapon had spent the last seven years honing over various broken bones and bloody wounds. But it felt too selfish to keep him close, especially when Chanyeol was faced with the opportunity to return to Korea, so Baekhyun ignored the tug in his chest and pretended like he wanted him to go.

“I suppose if Baekhyun doesn’t need me here...” Chanyeol exhaled heavily. “I can help out.”

“Thanks, Chanyeol,” Junmyeon said, smiling. “Let’s work out the details later. We leave tomorrow morning, so that gives us some time to run through a mission plan tonight.”

“Sure.” His weapon shrugged. “I’ll see you later, I guess.”

“Take care of yourself, Baekhyun,” Yifan said, and he couldn’t help but smile up at the taller man. The weapon looked intimidating, but there was a certain clumsy kindness to him that Baekhyun had always liked.

The two pairs of partners said their goodbyes, Junmyeon and Yifan heading off to finalize the authorizations for the upcoming mission.

“South Korea,” Baekhyun mused when they had left. “You really should visit your family while you’re there.”

Chanyeol had already started walking away and Baekhyun yelped, nearly running to catch up.

“When’s the last time you talked to your parents?” the meister asked when he was finally in step with his weapon. Chanyeol slowed considerably to match his stride, despite the panic Baekhyun could sense from him that was likely urging him to avoid this conversation entirely.

“Do last year’s Christmas cards count?”

“No.” Baekhyun frowned. “You send those to everybody. I’m pretty sure you even sent one to your third grade guitar teacher-”

“Look, I’m not going to see them,” Chanyeol said firmly, ignoring his question. “The end.”

Baekhyun’s protestations were cut short by the cheerful sound of his name being called, followed by Chanyeol’s. Both partners turned to see a pair of figures moving towards them: one taking long, bounding strides as the other followed much more calmly.

“Is that,” Chanyeol squinted. “Lu Han and Yixing?”

“I think it is,” Baekhyun said, a smile rising to his face.

Baekhyun had always been a bit starstruck by Zhang Yixing, ever since he’d first seen the older boy in weapon form. Yixing was a Chinese _dao_ : an elegant, single-edged bronze sword that moved as fluidly as Lu Han’s own arm when the meister wielded him. Delicate engravings decorated the slender edge of his blade, markings in a language Baekhyun couldn’t read. He didn’t need to though, to appreciate how astoundingly beautiful Yixing’s weapon form was.

Yixing’s human form wasn’t bad looking either, and Baekhyun admitted that he had been plagued by a terrible crush on the older boy when he was fifteen years old. Maybe it was the dimples, or maybe it was Baekhyun’s fondness for sword-type weapons, but he’d spent a solid year trying to not turn red around the other boy. Lu Han hadn’t been shy in teasing him about it, something Baekhyun still held a vague kind of grudge against him for. Chanyeol, he suspected, had been oblivious as he always was in scenarios that involved Baekhyun’s romantic attraction to… anyone, really. Including him.

Lu Han was the first one to reach them, and he pulled both boys into a hug with his wiry, deceptive strength. The earthy smell of the meister’s expensive cologne hadn’t changed in the last two years, and Baekhyun breathed in its comforting scent along the edges of the older boy’s collar. If Yixing had been Baekhyun’s childhood crush, then Lu Han had been his surrogate big brother - a slightly annoying, but ultimately supportive, presence that guided him through his younger years at the academy.

“Careful of Baekhyun’s arm,” Chanyeol said, pushing back against Lu Han’s chest slightly as he pulled away.

“You all right there, kid?” the meister asked, a wry smile on his face as he mussed Baekhyun’s hair with one long-fingered hand.

Baekhyun ducked out his reach in disgruntlement just as Chanyeol stepped forward, a warning to his stance. The younger boy loomed over the group of them, something Baekhyun found amusing despite the fact the he spent most days either begrudging Chanyeol’s height or feeling pointlessly attracted to him for it.

“I’m fine,” Baekhyun sighed, already growing tired of saying the words.

“His arm does look a little worse for the wear,” Lu Han went on, turning his attention to Chanyeol instead. “Training accident?”

“No, field mission.”

Lu Han whistled.

Irritated with being spoken about as if he wasn’t there, Baekhyun took it upon himself to ignore the two men and face Yixing instead.

“How was Australia?” he asked the weapon with a tight smile. Yixing’s returning smile was much softer by comparison.

“Hot,” the weapon replied. “And extremely poisonous. I have to admit, it’s good to back in Japan.”

“What brought you back, anyways?” Baekhyun probed curiously. _And what were you doing at the Oceania branch for such a long time in the first place?_

“I couldn’t stay away from Minseok too long,” Lu Han interrupted, bumping against his weapon’s shoulder. “And Yixing humored me.”

 _Diversion_. Baekhyun decided now was not the time to push for answers, but resolved to think about the obvious avoidance later. He eyed the other meister balefully instead. “I swear that guy is going to get a restraining order against you someday.”

“Not before Jongdae does,” Chanyeol said, laughing.

“Speaking of Minseok,” Lu Han said, very obviously ignoring them now, “If we hurry we might make the tail end of his lecture.”

After a pair of hurried goodbyes that seemed to Baekhyun more like a careful retreat, they watched the two men hurry off. 

Chanyeol shook his head ruefully. “As much as I hate to admit it,” he said, “It’s nice to have them back.”

“I suppose,” Baekhyun said slowly. “But I can’t help but wonder what they were doing over there in the first place.”

Chanyeol glanced down at him in confusion. “What do you mean?”

Baekhyun bit his lip, hesitating. “Do you remember how suddenly they were shipped off to Australia two years ago? Didn’t that ever seem strange to you?”

The look Chanyeol gave him was long and level, and Baekhyun took it as a cue to continue.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Why would they send one of the top meister-weapon pairs in the world to the most peaceful, isolated branch of the DWMA for two years? What could Lu Han and Yixing have possibly been doing in Oceania?”

“You think they’re lying,” Chanyeol said, voice monotone.

Baekhyun locked eyes with him. “I think they came back to the East Asia branch for reasons they aren’t telling us.”

Chanyeol’s gaze broke from his to follow the pair as they disappeared around a corner of the hall.

“I don’t like secrets,” his weapon said finally. The connection between them was static, almost as if Chanyeol was dulling his emotions in an attempt to hide them from Baekhyun. The contrariety of it confused him. The possibility of it stung.

“I don’t either.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tfw you take way too many words to just introduce a few more characters and you realize the final product is going to be longer than you had anticipated. 
> 
> Meister/weapon pairs revealed so far: Baekhyun/Chanyeol, Minseok/Jongdae, Lu Han/Yixing, and Junmyeon/Yifan. Can you guess the remaining teams? One includes non-Exo characters :)


	3. Selenology

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prodigal daughter returns. In my halfway justifiable defense, I’ve been distracted by an unholy number of exams and Stranger Things 2, so this chapter took me a bit longer than I had anticipated to finish haha. Actually, it was going to be even longer but I decided to split it at the three-quarters mark to get it out sooner. On the plus side… that means that Chapter 4 shouldn’t take me nearly as much time since a lot of it is already written. In the meantime, thank you for all your support once again - I really do appreciate each and every comment and kudos. And now, enjoy!
> 
> Chapter Warnings: Graphic violence and mild gore

The lull in time directly after a mission was always nice for the first few hours, but Baekhyun quickly grew restless in mundanity of it. It was infinitely worse when he was injured and faced with the fact that even if he did want to choose his next mission, Chanyeol wouldn’t so much as let him get near the assignment board again for the next few days.

Of course, Chanyeol wouldn’t even be at the Academy for the next few days, something that was making Baekhyun increasingly gloomy as he considered the reality of it. He truly had no one to blame for it but himself, but he had felt a moral obligation to reunite Chanyeol and his family. Or at least, to put his best friend in the position to approach them. 

Chanyeol’s situation with his family was… complicated, to say the least, and Chanyeol’s less than delicate attempts to shuffle it under the rug and forget about it had never seemed to help. As his best friend, Baekhyun wasn’t sure if it was his right or obligation to mend the gap between them, but he was going to do his damnedest to try.

His partner had left hours ago for a mission briefing with Junmyeon and Yifan, leaving Baekhyun alone in their apartment to wallow in his boredom. He had curled up rather sullenly in the corner of their only couch, watching an obnoxiously-colored Japanese variety show flash across the screen with little interest. 

Baekhyun wasn’t angry at Chanyeol for leaving; he knew better than anyone that his partner was unwilling to go. But he was upset that he had to remain behind, and he was frustrated with his injury, and he was uneasy knowing for the next three days he would be completely unaware of Chanyeol’s wellbeing. Baekhyun didn’t know where to direct this worry and irritation so the easiest target somehow became the person least deserving of his wrath: Chanyeol.

He dreaded the silence that would settle on their apartment as soon as his partner walked out the door, the stillness that even now was threatening to creep in. Chanyeol had a way of brightening a room. He would draw attention first for his staggering height, and then keep it on him with the loud, steady rhythm of his voice as he slipped into an easy banter with whoever he crossed on his path. The weapon was pure energy when he laughed - face contorted and hands clapping - and there was something captivating about that.

From the perspective of his meister, Chanyeol’s soul was a fiery orange - all flickering heat and waving lines. Baekhyun liked looking at it. Fire might have been a frightening thing to most people, but Chanyeol’s flame was different. It was warm like heat rolling off a fireplace, and bright like a candle’s tip pushing away the darkness. Sometimes, it burned him. It left shiny red scars on his chest when Chanyeol would fight with him and scorch marks on his palms when their skin touched for a second too long.

Chanyeol couldn’t see his own soul, unfortunately. Only meisters had that ability. But Baekhyun remembered Chanyeol asking him once to describe it to him. He’d seen the tentative curiosity in the taller boy’s eyes, the hints of doubt that told Baekhyun his partner was once again feeling inferior as a weapon.

Baekhyun wanted to explain. He wanted to tell Chanyeol how beautiful his soul was, the vivid hues of yellow and red mixing in with the fiery tones of the glowing sphere. More than anything, he wanted to make Chanyeol believe just how precious it was - strong and warm and lovely. He could see it in Chanyeol’s eyes: the need for reassurance. Baekhyun desperately wanted to give him that. 

“It’s orange.”

There had been a prolonged pause, as if both of them were waiting for something else to be said. Baekhyun hoped he could hear the rest of his words. _Orange like a sunset, burning the highest peaks of the distant mountains. Orange like the ombréd skin of the ripest peach. Orange like the fire you pulled me out of in Beijing on that mission we were both too young for._

Baekhyun tried to convey that, in the tentative link between their souls.

But Chanyeol had just replied, “Oh,” and went back to scribbling on sheet music. 

Baekhyun didn’t think he got it.

It was a long time before he heard the beeping of their lock and the apartment door click open behind him. He didn’t turn around to greet Chanyeol, contented with the petty urge to sulk in his self-imposed misery.

Chanyeol was a hard person to ignore unfortunately, especially when he walked into the living room without so much as a greeting and flopped onto the couch to lay next to Baekhyun. Before he had time to even bite out a snappish remark Chanyeol’s head was coming down to rest on Baekhyun’s lap as the rest of his body stretched out to cover the sofa. His legs were so long the tips of his toes hung over the opposite armrest, something Baekhyun found frustratingly endearing. Against his will, he felt some of the sullenness in him fade as Chanyeol gave a contented sigh from his place on Baekhyun’s thighs.

They didn’t speak for a few minutes, Baekhyun still steaming from the frustration he was trying to cling to and Chanyeol sending waves of quiet calm through the link between them. It was hard not to be swept away Chanyeol’s comfort, and the warmth of his head against his lap.

“Baekhyun.” When he finally spoke, Chanyeol’s voice was sympathetic when he had no right to be. “I can tell that you’re irritated.”

“Maybe a little.”

“You’re the one that wanted me to go on this mission,” he said pointedly. There was a question there, as declarative as it was, and Baekhyun wasn’t sure he wanted to answer it.

“I know.” Baekhyun flicked Chanyeol’s hair out of his eyes. “How did the briefing go? Are you looking forward to your trip with Yifan and Junmyeon?”

“Are you jealous that I’m running off with another meister?” Baekhyun could hear the teasing edge in his weapon’s voice. It made him want to push him off the couch.

“No,” he said peevishly.

Chanyeol hummed, the sound a noncommittal agreement to his denial and Baekhyun could tell they both knew he was lying.

“I’m not…” he trailed off.

Suddenly feeling nervous and needing something to do with his hands, Baekhyun carded his fingers through Chanyeol’s bangs . He was surprised by the sudden wash of pleasure from Chanyeol’s side of the link but pushed the thought away distractedly. 

“I just… feel useless when you’re not here and I can’t go on missions.”

“Is that all?” Chanyeol asked, a smile in his voice. “It’s not that you’re going to miss me?”

Maybe it was because Chanyeol’s eyes were closed or Baekhyun’s mind was muddled from the pain medication, but he found himself feeling uncharacteristically open. 

“I will,” Baekhyun whispered. “I’m going to miss you.” _I already miss you._ “I hate when you go on missions without me.”

Chanyeol opened his eyes then, and Baekhyun wasn’t prepared for the full force of his half-lidded gaze on him. 

“Let’s stay in tonight,” the other boy said from his lap suddenly. There was an odd mix of determination and relief emanating from his side of the bond, and Baekhyun realized his partner may have been more hurt at the idea of being sent away than he had thought. “Let’s order takeout and play video games and forget that I won’t be here tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Baekhyun replied, voice still soft.

“Okay.” Neither of them moved.

“It’s funny that you get so worked up over this stuff when you’re the one that forced me to take this assignment in the first place,” Chanyeol said with a rumbling laugh. Baekhyun felt it against his thighs in a way that made him shiver. “You know I can still back out of this, right?”

That was all the resolve Baekhyun needed to set aside his selfish comforts. “No, I’m just being overdramatic. Don’t you dare drop out of this mission.” His hand stilled against Chanyeol’s forehead. “And if you don’t visit your family while you’re in Seoul, don’t you dare think of coming home either.”

“Baekhyun…” There was a warning in Chanyeol’s voice.

“At least talk to your sister, Yeol,” Baekhyun pleaded. “Or your mother. Please? For my own sake, if you won’t do it for yours.”

His weapon partner sighed, “I’ll go see Yoora. Maybe.”

“Make that ‘maybe’ a ‘definitely’ and I’ll make dinner tonight,” Baekhyun said.

“Is that supposed to convince me because I think I’ll pa-” Chanyeol’s words ended in a laugh as Baekhyun smacked him softly with an oversized pillow. 

In the end they did order out, sparring both of them from Baekhyun's poor attempts at cooking. Takeout boxes littered their coffee table as they settled into their living room for a night of mindless entertainment and Chanyeol’s collection of One Piece DVDs. The show had never been particularly exciting to Baekhyun, but Chanyeol loved it and so Baekhyun humored him. Also, his weapon had effectively trapped him in the cage of his long arms when he pulled Baekhyun into his lap as the opening credits flashed across the screen. It wasn’t really a position Baekhyun felt inclined to move from, even if Chanyeol allowed him to.

The couch wasn’t really meant to fit two people, especially not when one of them was Chanyeol-sized, but they somehow made it work. By one in the morning both of them were too sleepy to really care if it was cramped anyways, or if Baekhyun’s elbow was digging into Chanyeol’s side, or if Chanyeol’s faint stubble tickled Baekhyun’s forehead when his weapon tucked his head under his chin. 

Baekhyun wasn’t sure which one of them fell asleep first, or if they both slipped into unconsciousness at the same time, like a sleeping spell had suddenly been cast over the apartment. When he woke Chanyeol was gone. The only evidence of his presence on the couch was the blanket tucked around Baekhyun that he knew hadn’t been there last night. 

He expected the apartment to be deathly quiet, but an unfamiliar acoustic melody was playing from the kitchen radio. The calming sound of guitar strings softened the silence of the apartment. Chanyeol must have turned the radio on before he left knowing that Baekhyun hated heavy, pressing white noise more than anything.

The gesture was so effortlessly thoughtful it hurt, and Baekhyun curled back into the couch, trying to capture any of Chanyeol’s lingering warmth he’d left behind on the cushions.

_Three days,_ he told himself. _It’s only for three days._

~

Tokyo was still aglow with the last faltering hours of night life as the airplane sped off the runway. When Chanyeol gazed out the plane’s window it was hard to believe the city could ever be dark, even in the coldest hours of the night. But he knew the nooks and crannies of the Tokyo that bred shadow and he knew the evil that walked its streets. Seoul was the same way. It promised safety and novelty with its shiny modern facade but that all fell away in the darkness of a back alley, or a few years at an office cubicle. Chanyeol supposed that was why his family suited the place so much. The Parks could match Seoul’s viciousness with their own slick charm and were just as quick to turn their backs on one of their own when it suited them.

Chanyeol hadn’t always been on bad terms with his parents. He grew up in a happy, wealthy family with a father that read the newspaper on Sunday, and a mother that wore Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses around their apartment, and an older sister that had once been a child model. There was a prestige to his family’s name, and not only due to their sizable business ventures. No, the Parks were famous for another reason - a reason that still had Chanyeol ducking his head when introduced himself on any given campus of the DWMA.

“Park Chanyeol,” he would begin, and watch as their eyes would light with recognition. “Weapon.” 

Their expressions would fall, either in confusion or disbelief. Some would ask him to repeat his introduction, some asked if he was joking. When he had finally made it clear that yes, he was a Park, and yes, he was a _weapon_ and not a _meister_ the atmosphere between them would grow uncomfortable. 

Chanyeol’s family hailed from a long line of very talented meisters. His father was a meister, trained at the same branch of the DWMA that Chanyeol now worked at. So was his grandfather, and his father before him, and so it went. As a child, Chanyeol had always expected to attend the East Asian Branch when he eventually came of age. But he had never planned to do so as a weapon.

Demon weapons were created, hundreds of years ago, as a way for humans to combat the powers of the Order of Witches. It was centuries before the Treaty would eventually be signed between the witches and the humans, an agreement that was still very new and indisputably flawed. These weapons had given humans the necessary edge to oppose the witches and, with a competent meister, overpower them. 

There were exactly two ways in which a carrier of the weapon gene could realize their transformative power. The first and most common method was to be a descendant of a demon weapon. The ability was passed down directly through blood ties between family members. Weapons in this circumstance would be raised with the full knowledge of what they were, and what future that promised them. A child born of a demon weapon would not necessarily carry the gene, and it would often skip generations. But ultimately many weapons knew years before they eventually stepped through the doors of the DWMA they the would be stepping through them. And it was likely someone in their family had experienced a similar event years ago, and could guide them through it all.

The other way to become a weapon, which could only be explained by old magic still lingering in the edges of the world, was for a person to manifest the abilities during puberty. The transformation would strike unexpectedly, unannounced and, sometimes, unwanted. 

Weapons could not be meisters.

Chanyeol didn’t know why, he didn’t understand the biology of it, or the magic. But he did remember the absolute horror that had washed over him when he first partially manifested as a weapon when he was twelve. There hadn’t been a warning, hadn’t been an ache or a preemptive pain. One moment he’d been calmly cutting a steak at a dinner party hosted by one of his father’s business associates and the next moment his arm had become a razor sharp blade, slicing through the silk tablecloth. 

It hadn’t hurt. Chanyeol wished it would have, because that would have made it seem at least somewhat unnatural, wrong. He wanted it to be wrong; he wanted it to be a mistake. 

Needless to say, the dinner party was thrown into panic. Some women screamed, the man next from him leapt from his chair, and Chanyeol had only stared with growing horror at the sword edge that had replaced his arm.

_That’s not mine,_ he thought dizzily. _I’m a meister. I’m supposed to be a meister!_

He only realized he had started crying when his mother grabbed his wrist and pulled him up from his seat to swipe at his face with a handkerchief. It must have been his father’s but he was too scared to even look at him and focused instead on trying to will the blade on his arm to disappear. It didn’t, and the clamor of the dining room only grew louder as the glint of the chandelier caught on his metal appendage. 

He was distantly aware that his parents were giving hasty apologies, and then hasty goodbyes, as they ushered their children back into the leather-lined interior the family car. Chanyeol sobbed the entire way home to the shrill soundtrack of his mother’s voice in the background. He couldn’t tell if she was speaking to him, or to Yoora, or his father. Regardless, his father remained frighteningly silent and that made Chanyeol cry even harder. 

No more than three weeks after, Chanyeol was on a plane to Japan, tucked comfortably into his first-class seat as he glared at the diminishing view of Seoul out the window. He hated the sight of it, and the newly printed “WEAPON” on his passport, and devastating knowledge that he was heading for the school he’d been dreaming of for years as the wrong half of a weapon-meister pair. 

It had been sunrise when Chanyeol landed in Tokyo for the first time. The waking sun had cast an angry red glow across the sprawling metropolis and Chanyeol had hated it, for its beauty and everything it stood for. Somewhere in that city was a person who would one day wield him and call him “my weapon” and treat him as little more than a tool. Chanyeol felt sick and he knew it wasn’t from the motion of the plane dipping beneath him. 

Moving to Tokyo had ineffably changed something between Chanyeol and the rest of his family. It was something similar to the rift that formed between them when he first manifested as a weapon, but a lot more final. In his first few years at the DWMA he would make visits home for Chuseok and Christmas and the short periods of time that constituted as his summer break. But those visits dwindled until he was making the trip home to Seoul once a year, and then once in two years, and then never. He spent his last few Chuseoks with Baekhyun at his mother and grandmother’s home in Bucheon. The last time Chanyeol had seen his own family was over a year ago at his graduation ceremony. His father had not attended. 

“Chanyeol.” Junmyeon’s voice was soft where it came from the seat in front of him. 

“Hm?” Chanyeol glanced away from the window, forcing a smile to rise on his face as he did so. The meister was peeking over the edge of the seat in front of Chanyeol, a faint look of concern on his face. 

“Are you okay? You looked like you were brooding over something.”

Chanyeol brushed a hand through his silver hair, the very picture of sheepishness. “I’m fine. Take-offs get me a little queasy is all,” he lied.

Junmyeon winced sympathetically. “Sorry to hear that. If it makes you feel any better, we should have some time after we land in Seoul before we head out to Jeonju. You can meet up with your family then.”

“Yeah.” Chanyeol turned back to face the window. “That makes me feel a lot better.”

~

Being away from Chanyeol reminded Baekhyun of how much of a constant companion he was. Baekhyun had been feeling useless since his injury but with Chanyeol gone he felt even more listless, and bored, and… lonely. It was an unfamiliar feeling, and the foreignness of it made him realize just how much time the two spent together, and how rare it was for them to be truly separated.

Two different times he caught himself heading in the direction of the dojo, only to spin on his heels when he realized it. It wasn’t that he thought he couldn’t handle a match right now, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to hide it from Chanyeol afterwards and he really didn’t want to begin their reunion with another fight.

Of course, a three day separation didn’t really warrant the distinction of “reunion.” But that was a different matter altogether.

It was a mostly boredom, he convinced himself, that drove him to slip through the back door of the Minseok’s Soul Studies lecture hall. Baekhyun ducked down to sit in the furthest seat from the front amongst the gathered collection of teenage students in varying states of consciousness. Beside him the meister Huang Zitao, affectionately called Tao, was scribbling meaningless doodles in a spiral-bound notebook. His weapon partner, Oh Sehun, was slumped over the surface of the mounted desk, handsome face calm and uncharacteristically soft in his sleep. His normally arch eyebrows were relaxed as he exhaled slowly against the desk.

Baekhyun had always thought it was fitting that Sehun was born as a weapon, because he had always been the type of person to let things happen to him rather than make things happen. Even so, for someone so remarkably apathetic there was an edge to him that Baekhyun acknowledged. Baekhyun could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen Tao and Sehun fight together but when they did, they were a magnificent picture. Sehun’s weapon form was a staff that was just as long and elegant as the lanky teenager himself, and Tao wielded him skillfully. 

Tao looked up as Baekhyun slid into the seat next to him. His sharp eyes lit as he recognized him, the expression transforming the intimidating planes of his face into something much more innocent.

“Hello,” Tao greeted him in Korean. The younger meister was always practicing his Korean on anyone that would listen, something Baekhyun couldn’t help but admire. Partnerships between individuals of different nationalities weren’t exactly commonplace at the East Asian Branch, for reasons Baekhyun thought may have been more complicated than language barriers. Seeing partnerships like Tao and Sehun’s blossom was always refreshing.

He ruffled the younger meister’s tawny hair, then reached across him to flick the nose of his weapon partner. Sehun sat up groggily. When his cloudy eyes finally focused on Baekhyun he noted somewhat uneasily how distinctly haggard the seventeen-year-old looked. It hadn’t been so obvious with his head against the desk but under the bright lights of the classroom dark circles marked the skin beneath Sehun’s eyes.

“The stronger a meister’s affinity for Soul Perception, the more susceptible they are to the Madness.” Minseok’s voice cut through Baekhyun’s thoughts and pulled his attention back down to the podium. “Which means all meisters should always make a conscious effort to protect themselves from outside forces while in the vulnerable state of Soul Perception. When you use Soul Perception, you are immobilized, and it leaves you open to forces that may attack both your body and your mind.”

The Madness. Just the sound of it made Baekhyun shift in his seat, shoulders slouching as if to make himself smaller. The Madness was a malevolent force thought to be present in every living being that had the ability to influence their actions. Most people lived their lives without ever noticing its presence inside them but there were stories of meisters that had fallen victim to it and had turned on their own weapons, before turning against humanity. 

In the worst cases, the Madness spread like a disease between partners until they developed a highly volatile Madness Wavelength. The Madness wasn’t anything like normal psychosis; it was a forcible alteration of consciousness, and sudden urge that made people do things they wouldn’t do otherwise. 

_Bad things,_ Baekhyun thought. Terrible things.

The only thing that frightened Baekhyun more than being controlled was losing control, and while in one case he could always fight back the other left him defenseless to his own consciousness. 

He’d always had a knack for Soul Perception. Not every meister was capable of using the skill, and even fewer had a range as far as Baekhyun did with his own ability. The idea that this talent left him more susceptible to the darker forces of the world caused a stirring of unease within him. 

Baekhyun turned his attention back to Tao and Sehun to distract himself. Sehun had now picked up his own pen to join his meister in scribbling doodles across Tao’s notes. Baekhyun watched their two heads bent together - content, at least for a moment, with the kind of quiet reassurance the sight brought to his thoughts.

~

Huang Zitao had a problem. His problem didn’t have a name, but if it did, he thought it would sound something a little like “Oh Sehun.” In fewer words.

Sehun himself wasn’t necessarily a problem. He was actually Tao’s best friend, and they had been inseparable since the year they both enrolled at the DWMA. Somehow, they hadn’t needed a common language to become fast friends and an almost inevitable partnership soon followed, given that Tao was a meister and Sehun a weapon. It seemed to be a natural progression that would one day lead to a strong meister-weapon bond. 

And maybe it would have, if their two souls hadn’t been so completely incompatible.

It was extremely dangerous for a meister to wield a weapon with a soul wavelength that didn’t align with their own. The physical effects of doing so put an insurmountable toll on the human body, something both individuals in the partnership would eventually feel. The weapon would be bombarded by their meister’s wavelength with enough force to cause internal damage that remained even after their transformation back into their human form. The meister, in turn, carried the weight of the discord between wavelengths in a way that burdened both his actual body and the mental state required to form a resonance link with his weapon.

Tao wasn’t sure why they remained partners, when it was slowly killing both of them. It wasn’t like either of them were unskilled or unlikely to find partners whose soul wavelengths did match with their own if they really tried. But Sehun had always seemed reluctant to speak about their problem, as if putting words to it would somehow affirm its existence. 

Unfortunately, the effects of the dissonant bond had only been getting worse recently. Four years of discordant resonance were taking a toll on Tao’s body. At first it was simple things like an ache in his muscles after wielding Sehun’s weapon form hours. Then he noticed the slow drip of blood from his nose after missions, a pressure in his sinuses moving back into his brain. 

“I hit my nose,” or “It’s dry outside.” It was easy to explain the incidents away to his partner. Sehun had accepted them wordlessly, an emotion Tao didn’t understand fluttering across their weak link for the briefest of moments. He’d always had trouble deciphering Sehun’s emotional state through their resonance bond. But that was just an expected side effect of having such incompatible souls in the first place. It was like watching someone shout at him through a clear pane of sound-proof glass; he knew they were telling him something but he was deaf to the sound of their words.

Tao and Sehun were dangerous on their own and they were dangerous together. But most of all, they were dangerous to each other.

~

Once his plane had landed, Chanyeol did send a half-hearted text message to Yoora announcing that he would be in Seoul for the morning. She seemed like the safest option and he assumed she would be busy enough with her news anchor job to not respond anyways. But this was Yoora, and she had the iron tenacity of his father in a much smaller body, so she had demanded they meet at a cafe between the news station and airport.

Something inside Chanyeol had been relieved, as much as he wanted to deny it, that his text message hadn’t been ignored. But Yoora had always been the most accepting member of his family in that she never really had expectations for him other than to be her baby brother. His sudden manifestation as a weapon had scared her and he knew the distance between them came from a lack of understanding rather than contempt. But she reminded him a little too much of his mother, and consequently his father. And that always made Chanyeol conscious of just how much he’d failed to be the heir his father had wanted.

It had been easier than he expected to slip back into conversation with Yoora after the initial hug she pulled him into, which wasn’t to say it was actually easy. After a stilted few minutes of small talk while they waited for their drinks, she’d quickly turned to grilling him about the details of his personal life. It didn’t go unnoticed by Chanyeol that they both stayed safely away from the words “meister” and “weapon.”

“How about your girlfriend? Are you still dating that girl, Sooyoung?” his sister had pressed.

“Ah, no.” Never mind that Chanyeol had cut that relationship off almost a year ago after realizing, much like all his past girlfriends, that the attempt had been a poor distraction from his feelings for Baekhyun. It hadn’t been fair to anyone involved, least of all the girls he’d strung along. “We broke up a while ago.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.” Yoora took a tentative sip of her espresso. “And how’s Baekhyun doing? Has he grown any taller since I last saw him?”

Chanyeol grinned at that, a real grin. Baekhyun had always made it a point to compare his height to Yoora’s in the rare instances when they did meet, as if acknowledging that he was taller than Chanyeol’s older sister was somehow an accomplishment. “Not as much as he likes to pretend he has. I think he’s still got a few centimeters on you though.”

Yoora stared at him, the sudden silence making him uncomfortable.

“What?” Chanyeol asked nervously.

When she spoke, it was with a soft smile. “You’re brighter when you talk about him. Baekhyun, I mean.”

“He’s my best friend,” Chanyeol said sharply, uncomfortable under the sudden scrutiny. “And my partner.”

“Right.” He didn’t like the look in Yoora’s eyes. “Where is he today? I would have liked to see him again.”

Chanyeol explained Baekhyun’s injury in brief, which gave him the opportunity to swiftly transition into his need to return to his other teammates and continue with their mission. The siblings said their goodbyes quickly, the awkwardness of their greetings returning with a fleeting final hug. Chanyeol was almost certain it was relief that he felt as he slipped out the cafe’s door.

~

“It’s that house.”

The woman in front of them twisted her hands nervously in her lap, gaze averted.

“House?” Junmyeon prodded gently. He, Yifan, and Chanyeol were seated on the floor around the edge of a low wooden table. All eyes were fixed on the woman in front of them - _Kim Taeyeon_ , as the mission file had stated. She hadn’t been nearly as pretty in the passport photo as she was in person, he noted. Taeyeon was petite and carried a sort of agelessness to her, as if she was simultaneously eighteen and thirty at the same time. 

She was also the last of their contacts to track down and speak with for the day, as dusk was now rapidly falling around them. It had taken only two hours to reach Jeonju on the KTX, leaving most of their afternoon to follow up on leads around the city. Jeonju was a strange mix of urban and historic; apartment complexes crowded together in some parts while the more traditional Korean houses spotted the outer edges of the city. The latter was where the team had done the majority of their reconnaissance, speaking with witnesses related to the case. Their focus had largely been on the families of the missing persons, and if none of their family was to be found in Jeonju, their neighbors. The victims had ranged from male to female, fourteen years old to forty, with no obvious pattern to their appearance or vulnerability. It was strange, Junmyeon thought, how little the characteristics seemed to match up. 

Even stranger was the the only commonality between the cases.All their inquiries seemed to pointing to the same direction: a house, hidden in the forest that lined the outskirts of Jeonju. A house with a mysterious occupant and a suspicious proximity to most of the disappearances over the last year. It sounded like a witch’s lair if Junmyeon had ever heard of one. Now the only question was whether that witch was in fact implicit in the vanishing townspeople.

“My little sister went missing while playing in those woods. We found her hat lying in the foliage close to the house. It’s the only place she could have gone. I’m sure of it,” Taeyeon said. A section of her dark hair slipped out from behind her ear as she spoke, and she tucked it away distractedly.

“She was the last person to disappear wasn’t she?” Yifan asked.

Taeyeon’s head dropped, her stance decidedly defeated.

“Yes,” she answered quietly. “Two weeks ago. When the police couldn’t find her I contacted the DWMA. People want so badly to believe there isn’t something supernatural happening here, but I need to know. If there’s even a chance of it, I need to know - for Hayeon’s sake.”

“We’ll do our best to find her,” Chanyeol said reassuringly. Junmyeon gave a tight smile. Though the weapon likely meant well, it wasn’t good to give false promises when Junmyeon’s gut was telling him their efforts may come too little, too late for most of the victims. The best he could hope for was a prevention of further disappearances. 

“Well, this seems to match up with all the other stories we’ve heard about the missing persons,” Yifan said. “The next step is visiting the house itself.”

“We can stop by tonight,” Junmyeon announced. “Surveillance only - there’s something I want to check.” His eyes flickered around the living area for a clock. “Do you have the time?”

Chanyeol pulled his phone from his pocket to click the screen alight. The numbers 9:08 glowed in bright white lettering. Behind them was a photo of someone Junmyeon quickly recognized as Baekhyun, his eyes crinkled into crescents with how hard he was smiling.

“Just after nine,” the weapon rumbled. Junmyeon nodded a thanks silently, mind already turning over a plan.

“And who’s this?” Taeyeon asked curiously. Her gazed had fixed on the glowing screen of Chanyeol’s phone, or more specifically, the picture of the boy that illuminated it.

Chanyeol clicked the lock screen back to blackness quickly, looking flustered. “Ah, my meister.”

Her gaze flickered to Junmyeon curiously. “You mean he isn’t…?”

“Oh, Junmyeon? No, Yifan is his only partner. I’m just here for backup.” Chanyeol smiled his signature wide-toothed grin. Despite its brightness, something about the expression told Junmyeon he was uneasy with the sudden questions about Baekhyun.

“I see.” Taeyeon’s voice was neutral, as unreadable as her dark eyes.

“Well, we may not have daylight but there’s still plenty of time for an investigation,” Junmyeon said firmly. Yifan was rising to stand before he had finished speaking, hearing the finality in his voice. His hand came to rest in the small of Junmeyon’s back when he followed suit. After a moment of hesitation Chanyeol jumped up to follow.

“Thank you,” Taeyeon said softly. She inclined her head in a shallow bow towards the three of them. “This means a lot to me and my family. We want nothing more than justice.”

“Justice we can promise,” Junmyeon said. _But for you to see your sister again, I’m not so sure._

~

The house loomed in front of them, almost disappearing into the densely packed trees of the forest. It looked every bit like a witch’s lair down to the cracked tile roof of the _hanok_ and the rotting wooden timber of its beams. From what Chanyeol could glimpse, the inside of the house appeared as dark as the foliage around it.

Chanyeol glanced down at Junmyeon where the meister stood with his eyes closed, using Soul Perception to scour the surrounding area.

“Nobody’s here,” Junmyeon stated as his eyes flickered open. “I can’t sense anything.”

“Are you sure she’s not using Soul Protect?” Witches had a very particular wavelength of soul that was easy for a meister to read. But a witch’s ability to use Soul Protect masked the distinctive mark of their soul and made them appear convincingly human. They could hide in plain sight, and a meister would never know it.

“No, I’d at least be able to sense _someone’s_ soul inside if that were true. There’s… nothing. Nobody but us for kilometers.”

Yifan stepped forward towards the sliding doors of the house’s entrance. “It looks abandoned. Do you think it’s warded?” Chanyeol asked.

“If this is a witch’s house, undoubtedly,” the taller weapon answered. Just as he finished speaking the doors to the house slid open with an ominous scraping of wood against wood. The three men froze, gazes fixed on the blackness that beckoned inside.

“I think we’re in the right place,” Yifan muttered.

“Are you _sure_ we’re alone?” Chanyeol repeatedly uneasily.

“Positive. Transform please, Chanyeol,” Junmyeon ordered. “Yifan, stay human.”

Chanyeol did so, willing the transformation to take over his body with a blinding flash of light. It always felt strange being wielded by a meister that wasn’t Baekhyun. Not uncomfortable really, but foreign and unfamiliar. He felt his soul’s wavelength fall into rhythm with Junmyeon’s in a way that was entirely unlike his connection to Baekhyun. The bond wasn’t as visceral - as totally fulfilling - and while Chanyeol could pick up the faint buzz of Junmyeon’s emotions along the link, it was like listening to the tinny echo of a can kicked down a long tunnel. Small and nearly insignificant, swallowed up by the distance between their consciousnesses. 

“Let’s go.” Junmyeon moved forward with Yifan on his heels, stepping into the blackness of the house. The floorboards under their weight groaned as if they hadn’t been stepped on for years, but the sound was strangely muffled under the low hanging ceiling. Chanyeol watched as Yifan slipped into another room where his large frame disappeared in the darkness.

_This is your idea of stakeout?_ Chanyeol asked Junmyeon incredulously. _We’re practically begging to be caught._

“This isn’t a stakeout,” Junmyeon replied. “It’s an investigation. We need to know what’s inside this place, especially now that it looks like she knew we were coming.”

_This wasn’t the plan,_ Chanyeol said. _We’re on surveillance only, engagement in dire circumstances._

“We’ve done surveillance, and have reasonable doubt to investigate more closely.”

_And you couldn’t have told me this before we were about to enter her lair?_ Chanyeol grumbled. _Like, maybe during the mission briefing?_

“This wasn’t exactly part of the plan then,” Yifan deadpanned in the room over. “Also, you have a big mouth.”

Chanyeol bristled, making sure the emotion leaked over through the link between him and Junmyeon, though the action was lost on Yifan.

_Still, was the secrecy really necessary? We’re all on the same team at the DWMA._

“I wish that were true,” Junmyeon murmured. Before Chanyeol could press for an explanation Yifan called out.

“I think you need two need to see this,” he said.

Yifan was standing over an elaborately crafted desk seated low to the floor. Scattered across the top of the surface was a collection of small rectangles. Chanyeol felt his heart sink as they approached the desk and he could make out at the objects more clearly. They were I.D.’s - each printed with a name and photograph. 

“How many are there?” Junmyeon asked. Yifan was scattering the I.D.’s to photograph each one carefully, the shutter sound of his phone alarmingly loud.

“Twelve,” Yifan said, locking eyes with his meister. “And thirteen people have gone missing in the last year.”

_Do you see one for Hayeon?_ Chanyeol asked. _Taeyeon’s sister?_

Junmyeon rummaged through the pile of I.D.’s quickly.

“No,” he replied. “Maybe she wasn’t carrying one.”

“Maybe she’s still alive,” Yifan murmured.

“Let’s go,” Junmyeon told the group. “I think we’ve seen all that we need to here.”

_We just got here,_ Chanyeol said. _Are you sure?_

“Yes.” Junmyeon kneaded his forehead with one hand. “Whoever this rogue witch is, she wanted us to see this. The evidence was practically laid out waiting for us.”

_As a challenge?_ he asked.

“As a trap,” Yifan said darkly. “She’s setting us up for something. And as much as think you’re a powerful weapon Chanyeol, we need a better plan and more backup to deal with this. It’s senseless to rush in blind.”

This was why Yifan and Junmyeon worked so well together, as partners. It was like watching one person function in two different bodies. The realization stung a bit. Chanyeol’s relationship with Baekhyun had never been that easy, that comfortable. There was too many secrets, and even if they could finish each other’s thoughts, it was like they chose not to. They could talk for hours together and somehow never get there.

Once they were outside, Chanyeol changed back to his human form. His eyelids were heavy from exhaustion - the lack of sleep from the previous night and events of a very long day weighing them down. Not even the remnants of adrenaline could revive him as the trio began their path out of the forest.

“Can you call HQ and let them know we’ll be making an early return?” Junmyeon’s face was uncharacteristically hard.

“Sure,” Chanyeol replied, slipping his hand into his jacket to pull out his phone. When his hand felt only an empty pocket he frowned. 

“What’s up?” Yifan asked. 

Chanyeol continued to pat himself down, annoyance growing. “I can’t find my phone.” He cast his mind back to earlier when he’d taken it out of his jacket at Taeyeon’s house. Had he ever returned the phone to his pocket? It wasn’t something he typically forgot, but his mind was strangely blank. “Damn, I think I left it back at Taeyeon’s.”

Yifan was already pulling his out and dialling a number as Junmyeon looked on, brows drawn.

“Do you want to circle back around and get it?” 

“It’s late,” Chanyeol said, glancing up to the sliver of moon above them. “I can pick it up in the morning.”

“We won’t be here in the morning,” Yifan said, as he slipped his phone back in his pocket. “HQ is booking us a flight home now. We need to head back to Seoul immediately.”

“Are they that worried?” Junmyeon asked.

“Seems like it.” Yifan gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “Sorry Chanyeol, looks like you’ll have to do without for a bit.”

“That’s fine.” Chanyeol glanced back at the ominous silhouette of the witch’s house against the darkness of the forest. “I suppose we have bigger problems to worry about now.”

~

Baekhyun wasn’t sure if it was the sound of shattering glass or the sudden feeling of wrongness that pulled him from his sleep. He sat up abruptly in his bed to cast his eyes around his bedroom warily. The glowing numbers of his alarm clock read 2:39 a.m. and no light was filtering in through the slotted blinds of his window. His breathing sounded unnaturally loud to his own ears, or perhaps it was just coming more rapidly than it should have been.

“Ch-” Baekhyun began automatically, but stopped when he remembered he was alone in the apartment. Alone except for a presence in the living room that he could sense like an unwanted visitor when he let the lense of Soul Perception wash over his vision. It wasn’t a comfortable sensation at all, and something about the intruder’s soul felt sickly in a way that made Baekhyun’s skin crawl.

The apartment had gone eerily silent in the ringing echoes of the crash. It was a long moment before his ears caught the faint sound of glass crunching beneath a heavy weight. The noise had him swinging his legs over the side of his bed to carefully press his feet against the floor. 

Baekhyun’s eyes flickered around his poorly lit room once again for a potential weapon. For an instant, he considered grabbing Chanyeol’s guitar from his bedroom to use as a club but quickly discarded the idea. If he could make it to the kitchen, the knives there would suffice. Should suffice.

Another crunch. Whoever the intruder was, they were moving impossibly slow across the living room floor. Each noisy shuffle of their weight was opportunity for Baekhyun to slink forward, out of his room and down the hallway. He was still dressed in only a thin tee shirt briefs and the cold drafting down the hall through the shattered window made him shiver.

He was almost at the end of the hall when the shuffling sound grew louder, more frantic, as if whoever had broken into the apartment was approaching faster. The last place Baekhyun wanted to fight was in the cramped, dark space of the hall. In a decision he didn’t take the time to consider whether he would regret, Baekhyun sprinted down the hall to skid to a halt in the kitchen. 

Across the island of the kitchen counter that separated the two rooms, Baekhyun could see a silhouette freeze against the backdrop of their peeling wallpaper. The room was only faintly illuminated by the light filtering in through the broken window. Yellow light caught on the jagged shards of glass scattered across the floor and tossed it back towards the ceiling.

Still keeping the barrier of the island counter between him and the intruder, Baekhyun edged towards the knife wrack behind him.

“Who,” he asked slowly, “Are you?” Nausea was threatening to overtake him. He was distracted by the overwhelming wrongness of the presence before him, and the acrid scent of death that clung to them.

“Your soul,” the figure said softly. Their voice was paper thin, as if it could crumple as easily as an ancient manuscript beneath his fingers. It was higher than he expected, almost feminine. “Give it to me.”

Baekhyun’s fingers finally touched the smooth handle of one of the cooking knives. He slid it from its holder in one fluid motion.

“No.”

The figure was suddenly springing towards him, body catapulting across the kitchen island to slam him back against the counter. Blunt nails raked against the front of his chest before Baekhyun could shove his attacker away. In the closer proximity he quickly took in how sickly the person in front of him appeared. Their face was gaunt and vaguely inhuman, a clear indication that they were a corrupted soul too far gone past the point of redemption. He wanted to retch at the stench of death rolling off their twisted limbs, but steeled himself to move forward.

It was strange to fight with a weapon that wasn’t Chanyeol, even stranger to fight with one that didn’t connect to his soul wavelength. Baekhyun was reaching out with his soul unconsciously as he forced his assailant back into the light of the living room in a struggle of limbs. The knife blade in his hand was cold and unresponsive, but it would do the job.

“Mine,” the figure wheezed and the responding rush of anger at the words gave Baekhyun the strength drop the person to the floor with a sharp kick to their kneecap. Bone cracked and he lowered himself to kneel on either side of the intruder.

In the faint light of the living room it was somehow even harder to discern the attacker’s gender. They were wraithlike and barely human beneath him. _The effects of feasting on innocent souls,_ Baekhyun thought savagely as he twisted their head back to expose the expanse of their throat. 

“You won’t have my soul, or anyone else’s, any longer,” he snarled. An unfamiliar rage made his limbs shake; a red tint colored his vision.

He drove the blade down, hands holding the body beneath him pinned to the ground as the intruder gurgled their last breaths. Baekhyun rose only as the person’s form began collapse in on itself, disappearing into the dark void of matter forever. Only the pulsating red orb of their soul was left behind as the last fragments disappeared. 

His muscles went weak and wobbly as the sudden rush of fury left him, leaving him hollow. 

“This is bad,” Baekhyun told the empty apartment. There was blood in the crescents beneath his fingernails. Crescents like the moon that hung outside, always laughing down at him. “This is very bad.”

He stood there, covered in black blood and panting clouds of gray mist into the frigid air of the living room, alone.


	4. Ephemeral Lake

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew... when life happens, life happens.

Minseok’s parents had been reluctant to send their twelve-year-old son across the Sea of Japan to train in what may as well have been witchcraft to them. Neither of his parents had been a meister or a weapon. Perhaps because of this, both saw the DWMA and all its occupants as a dangerous, mysterious organization with a hidden agenda behind its lattice screen doors. Minseok wasn’t sure why the agenda needed to be anything other than saving lives and preventing the spread of evil, but then again he’d always been more idealistic than the other members of his family.

And much more timid. The young boy had been painfully shy, uncomfortable in the baby fat he couldn’t seem to lose, and quiet as a mouse around everyone except for his family. The only thing he ever excelled in was his studies, so that was what he threw himself headlong into as he classmates played outside. Minseok would sometimes watch them from the second floor window of his classroom. He had been filled with some mixture of envy at their camaraderie and relief that he didn’t have to face the rush of nervousness that was inevitable when he was anywhere that wasn’t “alone.”

When the officials from the East Asia Branch of the DWMA arrived at Minseok’s school to run their annual meister aptitude tests for the sixth year students, he never would have expected his result to come back positive. But it did, and a strong positive at that, and for the first time in Minseok’s life he felt like he was bigger than the perfect marks on his report card.

Minseok had never been one to ask for things from his parents, but he very nearly begged them to let him attend the Academy. Once the idea had been planted in his head - his future as a meister, a faceless weapon partner by his side, defeating evil like a real hero - he couldn’t shake it. The DWMA promised him the closest thing to a destiny he’d likely ever have.

He learned very quickly that nothing was promised in life, not even what seemed to have been fated for him. An aptitude test didn’t mean he would be a good meister. Hundreds of classmates didn’t mean he would find the right partner. And as time went on he began to worry that he would ever find a partner, that maybe coming to the DWMA had been a cosmic fluke in the grand scheme of things.

It had been stomachable watching his classmates pair together his first week at the Academy, the week of opening galas and school-run events. Minseok had forced himself to make stitled introductions with the other students, first gravitating towards the other South Koreans and then settling for anyone that would give him a second glance.

Almost as if the other students could sense his reluctance, weapons reached out to him as well - some speaking in languages so foreign they made his head hurt. It was never the right match. Some weapons were so heavy he couldn’t lift them off the floor, others fit the grip of his hand awkwardly, most were just clunky. It never felt like an extension of his body, like an extension of his soul. The weapon would transform back and there would be an awkward commutual acknowledgement that their wavelengths simply didn’t align. Then they would go their separate ways, Minseok’s head hanging just a little lower.

Minseok’s first two years at the DWMA had been miserable without a partner. Weapons did not necessarily need someone there to wield them, as they had the capability to partially transform, thus acting as their own meister, of a sorts. They typically were not as powerful as a meister-weapon team would be, but they could function. A meister without a weapon, however… 

He wasn’t a meister at all. He was just a twelve-year old boy who could fight unusually well and went to school at the training academy for them.

And then there had been Lu Han.

Lu Han, who appeared late into Minseok’s first semester like the bright, effervescent star that he was. He came with coiffed hair and an entourage of designer suitcases behind him, looking entirely foreign in the sweeping main hall of the Academy and yet perfectly at ease.

Minseok had caught only a fleeting glance of Lu Han that first day, rushing as he was to his Soul Studies class. It was just quick enough to survey him with a detached interest before he slipped back into the masses of students around him and was lost in the passing period crowd.

In perhaps the only true instance of fate in Minseok’s life thus far, he would meet the boy only a day later in one of the poorly lit corners of the school library. Minseok liked the familiar book smell of old texts that permeated the place, and how easy it was to get lost in the three-story, sprawling expanse of bookshelves. He could forget about missing partners and noisy classmates in the pages of a book, with the added bonus of being rarely being disturbed.

Rarely being an important qualifier. 

“Are you a weapon?” 

The slightly accented Korean had come to him over his left shoulder, and he turned slowly to see if the person speaking was indeed addressing him. What met his gaze was another boy, roughly his own age, with a face so beautiful it took him an awkwardly long moment to realize he was looking at a boy at all.

The boy’s overly large eyes were bright, fervent.Though his body was still, Minseok could sense a kind of thrumming energy to his stance - an eagerness to leap into motion in an instant. With his auburn hair loose and framing his face, it took Minseok a moment to realize it was the same boy he’d seen in passing in the main hall the day prior. 

“N-no,” Minseok stuttered. “I’m here to train as a meister.”

The other boy’s face fell. It seemed wrong that someone so pretty should look so sad. “Oh. That’s too bad.”

“Is it?” He felt a sinking feeling in his stomach.

The boy seemed to sense his distress, because he offered another smile, though it wasn’t nearly as bright as the first one. “I’m a meister too. I was hoping we could partner together, but I guess not.”

“Ah,” Minseok said, realization dawning on him. “Because we’re both meisters.”

“Right.” The boy held out a hand to him, making Minseok’s own go clammy. “What’s your name?”

“Kim Minseok.” He shook the other meister’s hand delicately. It was warm and dry against his palm. Minseok thought handshakes were a very strange thing indeed.

“Nice to meet you, Minseok.”

His brain stuttered as it registered that it was now his cue to return the greeting. He bowed, and it was a relief to break eye-contact, if only for a second. “Y-you too. And your name is…?”

It hurt to look at a smile so bright. The sight of it didn’t make sense to Minseok, why someone would ever turn that kind of expression on him.

“Lu Han. Let’s be good friends, Minseok.”

Minseok quickly found out how difficult it would be to become acquaintances with Lu Han, let alone good friends. Maybe it was his good looks, or his cheerful attitude, or the way he excelled during training classes but the Chinese boy was constantly surrounded by a throng of other students. Lu Han quickly became the star pupil, the class heartthrob, and the center of attention wrapped into one athletic body. And that made him so far from Minseok’s reach, he didn’t even try to get close to the other boy.

In the end, it wouldn’t have mattered if he did try because Lu Han sought him out instead. At first Minseok called it coincidence. When Lu Han approached him the practice rooms to spar Minseok assumed there were no other partners available. When Lu Han would appear around the corner of a bookshelf in the library it must have been because he also liked books, although Minseok had never seen the meister so much as touch a text that wasn’t required reading material.

Then he grew suspicious. It felt like he was being set up for some elaborate joke. In any case, that made more sense the the ineffable, enigmatic Lu Han being friendly with him. Lu Han, the shining example of what every meister in training aspired to be. Lu Han, who was always the first student picked for demonstrations in class. Lu Han, who had found his own weapon within a week of his arrival, a sword so beautiful Minseok had envied him for it. And then he’d just envied him for having a weapon at all, for making his match when Minseok had no one.

Boys like Minseok and Lu Han weren’t meant to be friends. Minseok was twelve when he first had the thought. When he was sixteen, the universe confirmed it.

~

Baekhyun rapped his knuckles on the door of Minseok’s office before sticking his head into the room without waiting for the professor’s answer. The other meister was seated behind the neat stacks of paper that lined his desk, head bent in concentration.

“Hi Minseok, have a moment?” Baekhyun asked brightly. 

Minseok glanced up from his papers. “Baekhyun! Of course, how’s your arm doing?” 

He plopped into the chair across from the professor, curling his knees up to his chest in the oversized chair. “It’s fine. It really wasn’t too bad to begin with. I could be out on a mission now if Chanyeol would have agreed to it.”

“Where is he?” Minseok asked curiously. Baekhyun wondered if the space next to him looked as empty as it felt.

“I sent him off on a quest with Junmyeon and Yifan. He should be back in a couple of days.”

“You _sent_ him off?” Minseok was dubious. 

“Kidding,” Baekhyun said with a wan smile. “I’m his meister, not his master.”

Minseok considered him for a long moment, his face unreadable. “Are you alright?” the older meister asked finally. Baekhyun had always thought Minseok was an unusually perceptive person, able to read other people’s emotions like one of his oversized textbooks. “And not just being alone, I mean. You seem a bit… off.”

Baekhyun let out a shuddering breath. “I am, kind of. Last night I was-” He swallowed roughly. “I was attacked. In our apartment. Somebody, someone broke in through the window at 3 a.m. It was a corrupted soul, so far gone they must have been on the List, so I dispatched them but now I don’t know if more of them are going to attack me and don’t want to worry Chanyeol when he gets back so I’m just-” 

Baekhyun’s words cut off abruptly, stifled by his sudden realization that he was ranting. Without him noticing, his hand had risen to tug with the bottom lobe of his ear. It was a nervous habit Baekhyun had picked up after his mom had once cut his hair too short in first grade that he’d never been able to shake.

“Let me get this straight: you were ambushed in your apartment. Unprovoked,” Minseok said slowly. “That means the soul crossed into the warded boundaries of the DWMA campus. Baekhyun, this is serious.”

“I know. I know it is.” Baekhyun paused, considering. “And I don’t think it was an isolated event either. Lately, on missions, our targets have been particularly… volatile.”

Minseok was very still. “Volatile how?”

Baekhyun told him about how their targets would seek him out, and their erratic behavior and morbid fixation on his soul. It was a relief to finally tell someone about his concerns, particularly when that someone was a very calm, very steady Minseok. The other meister’s gaze was serious but unwavering as is words tumbled over each other.

Baekhyun didn’t, however, mention the overwhelming urge to destroy that had overtaken him last night as he battled the intruder. He wanted to chalk up his reluctance to shame but deep down he knew it was fear that choked back his words. A fear that putting a name to the sensation would make it real.

“I should have told someone sooner but I thought it was just a fluke. A stroke of bad luck. I guess.” He ran a hand through his hair, mussing it even further than its already disheveled state. “But I’m starting to think it’s not. That there’s something seriously wrong with me, to be drawing them in like this.”

“Your Soul Perception abilities have always been exceptional,” Minseok said thoughtfully. “If they’re being drawn in by your soul this may not be a case of you doing something wrong, but rather you do something a little too right.”

Baekhyun forced a smile. “That figures. Condemned soul stalkers must have been in the terms and conditions being a meister as talented _and_ good-looking as me.”

“I’m glad you can stay positive about this,” Minseok said dryly. The professor paused, pensive. “I’ll do some research and ask around. There may have been similar instances to yours that have happened and we just don’t know about it.” Baekhyun nodded. “In the meantime, stay on high alert. Try not to use your Soul Perception. As useful as it is, it may be making things worse. That’s really all we could do for now.”

He would feel vulnerable without his ability to visualize the souls around him, but Baekhyun nodded again nonetheless. It was a small comfort to have told someone, but a bigger one to know that Minseok would be there to help him through it.

Baekhyun was distracted as he left the professor’s office, mind still churning over their conversation. So distracted that he didn’t notice the person barrelling towards him down the hall until a firm body had knocked into his shoulder. Baekhyun staggered, but didn’t fall, as the force of the shove rocked his body backwards. Mouth already opening to protest the abuse, he spun to face the person.

They hadn’t so much as stopped after the collision, and Baekhyun found himself looking at the retreating figure of slightly shorter boy. The boy glanced backwards, just once, to where Baekhyun still stood in the middle of the hallway. The meister immediately recognized his telltale owlish eyes, though they were now filled with an unfamiliar anxiety. Just as quickly as he turned to face him, the other boy was looking away and continuing his mad dash down the hallway.

“Do Kyungsoo?” Baekhyun asked the empty air.

_How odd._

Kyungsoo was a weapon, and had graduated the same year as Chanyeol and Baekhyun despite being a year younger in age. The boy was notoriously solitary, and Baekhyun had never spent much time with him despite his frequent attempts at friendliness. Kyungsoo lacked some of the social graces most people took for granted, and was a curt as he was quiet.

He also lacked a meister, but that was something entirely within his power to control. Since the year of his enrollment at the East Asian Branch, Kyungsoo had turned down every potential partner that approached him. He declared that he didn’t need a meister to fight his battles and had stuck resolutely to this philosophy, with surprisingly good results. On missions, he would take on a partial manifestation form to act as his own meister. It was very rare for a weapon to use this fighting technique, but not impossible, and Baekhyun knew Kyungsoo had been one of the top graduates in their class. 

Kyungsoo was a strange one though, be it because of his self-imposed isolation or his dislike of conversation. He was hard to get close to and even harder to understand what made him tick. And this was coming from Baekhyun, who had an admittedly different idea of personal space than most people. He had attempted to approach Kyungsoo a number of times. But the younger boy was unyielding.

In both spirit and body, as it turned out, because Baekhyun’s shoulder was aching where the Kyungsoo had slammed into it. He rubbed it wordlessly as he watched the weapon hurry down the hall without another backward glance.

A sudden clamor in the direction Kyungsoo had been speeding away from caused Baekhyun to turn, nearly unconsciously. With the distraction of the other boy gone, Baekhyun could make out the unmistakable taste of panic in the air, the frantic energy of _something._

Baekhyun was moving back down the hall, away from Kyungsoo’s frantic dash, in an instant. His paced quickened as the noise grew, and only when he reached the main hall did he stop to gauge what exactly was happening. There was a living swarm of people clustered in the open foyer, the crowd centered on something frustratingly indistinct.

It didn’t happen often, but Baekhyun found himself grateful for his small stature as he slipped through the gaps between onlookers. He emerged from the crowd with one violent shove and was suddenly faced with the last sight he could have expected.

Well, Baekhyun wasn’t sure exactly what he had expected - but a bloodstained Kim Jongin trying to support a barely conscious Lee Taemin on one shoulder and a most definitely unconscious Jung Soojung on his other was not it.

Injuries weren’t uncommon amongst weapons and meisters returning from assignments but Jongin, one half of a set of dual wielding daggers, looked uncharacteristically pale as he held onto his meister and fellow weapon with either arm. 

“They need treatment, she just collapsed once we were attacked, and then Taemin got hurt before I could transform. He’s… I-I don’t know what’s going on, but they need help. We need help!” Words tumbled out of Jongin’s mouth in a steady stream of frantic syllables, some moving too fast to catch, others painting a picture of an unexpected ambush on the edges of the DWMA’s grounds as the team was returning from a mission. 

The crowd was still pressing in suffocatingly close, but Baekhyun was near enough to catch Jongin when he staggered. The younger man stared down at him, gaze clearing slightly with recognition after a worryingly long moment. Baekhyun tried for an encouraging smile.

“We’ll get you help,” he told the weapon, tightening his grip on the boy’s shoulder. “Let’s-”

A small figure suddenly burst from the crowd, and Baekhyun’s words died in his throat as he took in the compact figure of Minseok. The older meister’s gaze was steely as he surveyed the scene. Baekhyun could only see the professor in him, not the friend he’d spoken to minutes before. 

“Help me carry these two to the Dispensary,” Minseok snapped to the students closest to him. “Baekhyun, go find Yixing.”

Baekhyun nodded, already turning to move back through the crowd from the way he came. It parted much more easily this time, as if the onlookers could sense his purpose or were simply cowed by Minseok’s sternness, and he slipped away from the dispersing swell of bodies quickly.

It was only then that the meister was able to pick out the unbearably familiar presence nearby. Baekhyun recognized the sensation of him even before he heard the voice call out. He skidded to a halt in his frantic rush, turning to the sound of it in a reaction that was more instinctual than deliberate. Chanyeol stood there - oversized jacket half unzipped, silver hair windblown across his forehead.

They were moving toward each other before Baekhyun could think to respond, drawn together with the strange gravitational pull only partners seemed subject to. Baekhyun’s hand came up to grip the end of Chanyeol’s sleeve when he reached him, the action half-unconscious.

“Yeol?” he asked breathlessly. “Are you okay? What are you doing back so early?”

“We got all the proof we needed,” Chanyeol answered darkly. His eyes flickered down to Baekhyun’s body and widened, taking in the flecks of blood that spattered his sleeve, blood Baekhyun had only just noticed himself.

“It’s not my blood,” Baekhyun assured him quickly. His partner didn’t seem to hear him, reaching out to run his hands across Baekhyun’s body as if searching for a hidden wound. “It’s not mine! Chanyeol, I’m not hurt, I’m fine.”

He pulled his weapon’s chin down to meet his gaze. “You’d feel it if I was injured, yeah?”

Chanyeol stilled. His words must have finally reached the rational side of his brain and the weapon nodded, agreeing. “Sorry. It’s just seeing you again - and then all the blood - I was worried-’

“I know,” Baekhyun soothed him. “But right now Jongin and his team are in trouble.”

“Jongin?” The confusion was obvious in his weapon’s voice. “What does he have to do with any of this? What’s going on?”

“Just follow me.” Baekhyun grabbed Chanyeol’s hand and began pulling back down the hall. Even in the chaos, a guilty part of his mind felt reassured by the wide breadth of his weapon’s palm pressing against his own.

~

When they finally reached the Dispensary, Yixing on their heels, Chanyeol could hear voices echoing loudly before he even entered the room. Chanyeol had thought it odd Yixing was the first person Baekhyun would be sent to search for until he remembered the weapon hailed from a family of acclaimed Chinese apothecaries. The DWMA wasn’t without its own set of doctors and nurses however, so Minseok’s insistence it be Yixing was still vaguely puzzling.

The weapon had followed them without question, then immediately disappeared behind the set of white hospital curtains that hid the prone bodies of Soojung and Taemin. In the flash of their faces Chanyeol had caught as the curtain fell closed, he was struck by how calm they seemed under the guise of unconsciousness.

Jongin himself appeared mostly unharmed with only a shallow gash marring the left side of his forehead. The hair there was matted to his tan skin with the vibrant red of a wound that needed to be bandaged.

When Chanyeol said as much, Jongin raised a hand to touch the cut as if just realizing its existence. 

“Oh,” he remarked, even as a nurse bustled over to tend to the wound. He was visibly distracted, and his gaze kept flickering to the curtains separating him from his meister and fellow weapon, even as he continued his explanation of the ambush. Jongin hadn’t seen the original attack, and had turned only when he’d felt the sudden sharpness of Taemin’s pain. Soojung had already collapsed by then, felled by some blow Jongin somehow hadn’t sensed through their link.

“Taemin and I dispatched the soul together, but he’d been hit pretty hard in the initial attack. So I ate the soul and tried to carry them both back,” Jongin explained. “I wasn’t thinking it could be evidence or anything. Sorry.”

“Any personal vendettas someone has out for your team?” Chanyeol asked. “Did you recognize your attacker?”

“No.” Jongin shook his head. “It was a total stranger.”

“An attack on the DWMA campus,” Minseok said, and Chanyeol didn’t miss the way his gaze flickered to Baekhyun pointedly. His meister’s shoulders were drawn into a tense line, the posture somehow making him look even smaller than usual. Chanyeol could feel the spike of worry, of fear, that Baekhyun couldn’t quite tamp down across their bond. He reached out to grip the back of Baekhyun’s neck soothingly, but felt only a sudden wash of guilt from Baekhyun instead of reassurance.

His meister wouldn’t look at him. Something about that felt pointed too, and Chanyeol frowned.

“It must have been just outside the boundary of the campus grounds,” Jongin said, pulling Chanyeol’s focus back to the conversation. “I mean, the wards wouldn’t allow for anything like this to happen at the school itself, right?” 

“The wards are old, and this school is even older,” Baekhyun said, and though his voice sounded normal Chanyeol could feel how tense he was over the link between them. “Anything could happen.”

“Baekhyun, why don’t you and Chanyeol get some rest while the professors handle this?” Minseok interrupted gently. “I know both you and Chanyeol have had a long day. Welcome back, by the way.”

Chanyeol smiled, partly for Minseok’s benefit and partly because they had just been given an out in a conversation that was making Baekhyun increasingly agitated. “Thanks Minseok, we’ll do that.”

“I don’t think-”

“Make sure Jongin gets some rest too,” Chanyeol continued over Baekhyun’s shrill protests. “And Jongin - Soojung and Taemin are tough. Don’t worry too much about them.” His last statement had the other weapon smiling weakly, and he gave a half-hearted wave as Chanyeol turned to the exit. He felt more than heard Baekhyun make the decision to follow him, and the murmurs of conversation picked up behind the Dispensary doors before his meister had even fallen into step next to him.

~

Baekhyun fumbled his keys out of his pocket once they had reached their apartment. He could feel Chanyeol’s gaze on him, assessing him quietly. It was the first time they’d been alone since the chaos of that afternoon, and Baekhyun let that knowledge settle on his shoulders like a old, familiar blanket.

“You look exhausted,” the weapon finally said as the lock clicked open. “And this is coming from someone who just took two international flights in a single day.”

Baekhyun scrubbed his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt, as if it could erase the tiredness there.

“I didn’t sleep well last night,” he admitted. It wasn’t a lie per se. It just wasn’t the truth Chanyeol deserved to hear.

“Missed me too much?” Baekhyun could hear the smile in his weapon’s voice as the taller boy pushed open the door to their apartment.

“As if,” he scoffed, but their banter came to a dead stop as Chanyeol flicked on the lights - illuminating a room that Baekhyun had done a very poor job of cleaning after the events of last night. Most of the glass had been swept into the garbage and Baekhyun had made a weak attempt at fixing the window by taping Saran wrap over the empty frame, but he assumed he would have more time to hide the evidence of the scuffle before Chanyeol returned. He assumed wrong, and the realization made his heart sink as they stepped inside.

“Jesus, did you throw a party last night or something?” Chanyeol asked, eyes scanning the slightly rearranged furniture. 

It took Baekhyun a moment to decide how to respond. It felt wrong to lie. “Wouldn’t be much of a party without you.” True, and yet…

Chanyeol seemed to notice his evasion, and Baekhyun felt a fluttering of wariness across the bond. 

When Chanyeol spoke again, however, it wasn’t with further questions. “It’s cold in here,” his weapon stated. In a few long strides Chanyeol was pulling the drapes of the window aside with a sharp tug. Baekhyun’s ugly Saran wrap job greeted him on the other side, and the meister swallowed nervously.

“How did _this_ break?” Chanyeol asked. The wariness across the bond had transformed to something closer to anxious worry, and Baekhyun rushed to placate it.

“I was practicing some maneuvers and knocked into it with something.” The lie was thick in his mouth, tasteless. Baekhyun wasn’t sure where it came from.

“Remind me not to leave you alone again, if this is going to be how our apartment looks every time,” Chanyeol said with a careless laugh.

Baekhyun couldn’t bring himself to join in, and instead stepped closer to the window to pull the drapes over the incriminating evidence, like erasing it from sight would erase it from existence.

“Hold on.” Chanyeol caught his wrist, his large fingers a living shackle around the appendage. The drape was left hanging, a sliver of afternoon light shining in from the uncovered crack. “What is that?”

That, as it happened, was a few fragmented shards of window glass scattered beneath the open window. The glass itself was stained with the unnaturally dark, dried blood of the condemned soul. 

Baekhyun had left it there, thinking he could bring it to Minseok or some other professor to use for an investigation into the attack. He hadn’t counted on Chanyeol returning so soon. He also hadn’t counted on being caught in his lie so quickly.

“Is that... _blood_?” Chanyeol asked incredulously.

Baekhyun could only stare back at him, eyes very wide, as panic threatened to overtake him.

“In my defense,” he said slowly, “it isn’t mine.”

“Baekhyun.” Chanyeol’s voice was now frighteningly even, despite the fact that Baekhyun could feel his barely controlled anger through the link. In the face of that pulsing fury, he suddenly couldn't remember why he had ever lied. “How did the window break?”

“There was,” Baekhyun swallowed. “An incident.”

“An incident,” his weapon repeated flatly.

“A rouge corrupted soul broke in last night,” Baekhyun said quickly, as if getting the words out faster might lessen their impact. “I took care of it though, cleaned everything up. Oh, and I’m not hurt either, it’s just the window that got-”

“Shut up.”

Baekhyun froze. His gaze finally shifted upwards to Chanyeol’s face, but his weapon wasn’t looking at him. A muscle jumped in his jaw where it was clenched and the other boy’s eyes were dark with pain, and fixed on some distant point on the horizon.

“What?” Baekhyun asked weakly.

“I’ve heard enough.” Chanyeol’s voice sounded tired, but Baekhyun could still feel the barely repressed rage simmering beneath his words. “I’ve heard enough to know you lied to me, and didn’t trust me enough to tell me your fucking _life_ was in danger and now there’s blood on our living room floor and you’re clearly not fine. You couldn’t sleep well last night?” His weapon gave a choking laugh. “Was it so hard to be honest about that too?”

Now Baekhyun was defensive, bristling from the admonishment and guilt that prickled his conscience.

“I knew you were going to react like this,” Baekhyun bit out. “I was trying to-”

“Why do you always do this?!” Chanyeol roared.

Baekhyun flinched backwards, reflexively curling into himself at the sudden loudness of the words. An angry Chanyeol wasn’t unusual. But he’d never heard such a complicated mix of pain in fury in Chanyeol’s voice than what he heard now.

“You always,” Chanyeol said shakily, “pretend like everything is fine.” The tightness of his voice indicated just how hard he was trying to reign in his anger, as if he’d sensed Baekhyun’s alarm and tried to pull back. “You did this when we were kids too, acting like those pathetic fucks weren’t tormenting you. You hide the bruises, and never tell me what’s really happening or admit how much it hurts.”

Baekhyun wasn’t sure why, but his throat felt tight. It hurt, a sliding sort of pain that moved up his neck to the back of his head only to find a stopping place a the pressure against his eyes.

“Trust me, Baekhyun. _Trust me._ You’re my meister. What part of that do you not get? All I want to do is _protect_ you.” Chanyeol ran his hands through his hair with a kind of frantic energy that was almost frightening. “Maybe you can’t understand because you’re not a weapon but that is _all_ I want to do, from this day until forever. It’s always been like that, ever since the moment you asked me to be your partner.”

“You didn’t even say yes that day,” Baekhyun said hoarsely. It felt like he hadn’t spoken for days, though it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. “You said no, right away. It took months for you to change your mind.”

“But I wanted to say yes.” Chanyeol’s overlarge hands reached out to grip Baekhyun’s upper arms tightly. It forced Baekhyun to look up at him. He could see only desperation in his partner’s eyes, the need for some kind of acknowledgement. But Chanyeol’s words didn’t make any sense. “Before I even knew your name, I wanted to say yes.”

“No. That’s not what you said back then. You hated me. Instantly.” It still hurt to say the words. To even think them, though it had been seven years.

“I didn’t hate you. I was scared of you. Of,” Chanyeol gestured vaguely, “this.”

“What is ‘this?’” Baekhyun whispered.

“Resonance?” It was more question than answer. “Feeling so intensely that I belonged with someone? Knowing that I could never be a meister and would always be a weapon and fearing that you were looking down on my because of it? Fuck, I don’t know, Baekhyun. Just everything about you scared me. From the way you looked at me to your stupid messy black hair.”

At this, one of Chanyeol’s hand released its death grip on Baekhyun’s arms, the empty hand rising to entwine itself in Baekhyun’s hair. He had the briefest moment to appreciate the comforting warmth before it slid downwards to press against the back of his neck. For an instant, it seemed as if Chanyeol was going to pull him against his chest and Baekhyun felt his body reacting instinctively to the suggestion as he leaned forward. But then Chanyeol was pulling away entirely, so quickly it left Baekhyun unbalanced.

“I’m sorry.”

The words were tight, controlled. But Baekhyun didn’t want apology. He had just heard something ultimately more precious from Chanyeol and he wanted to know more. He needed to know more. 

Or maybe, he just needed Chanyeol.

Baekhyun didn’t wait for his best friend to try to walk away. Instead, he reached out. Carefully, with tentative fingers, he slid his hands around Chanyeol’s waist. The taller boy inhaled sharply, but didn’t pull away. Taking that as a sign that he wasn’t about to be rejected, Baekhyun stepped closer. His arms wrapped fully around the other boy’s waist, pulling him tight as his face pressed into the solid expanse of Chanyeol’s chest. 

“Don’t apologize,” Baekhyun mumbled into the fabric. He wasn’t even sure if Chanyeol could make out the words, but didn’t seem to matter. Baekhyun heard something like a sigh, and then firm arms were wrapping around his shoulders and pulling him even closer. He felt Chanyeol bury his face in his hair, felt his nose move along the crown of his head. Baekhyun gripped him back with a ferocity that startled even himself.

It wasn’t the type of hug friends give each other casually. And a small part of Baekhyun was afraid that Chanyeol would realize that, in the places where their bodies pressed together a little too closely. But a larger part of Baekhyun didn’t care.

Chanyeol’s heartbeat was fast and fluttering in his ear. Like a large butterfly, dancing across his earlobe. Baekhyun always loved when Chanyeol would play guitar for him, the surety of the chords ringing through their small apartment. The sound of Chanyeol’s heartbeat was infinitely more beautiful, he realized.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have lied. I don’t even know why I did.” Baekhyun hoped Chanyeol could make out his words, mumbled as they were against the fabric of his jacket. His weapon only hummed in response. All Baekhyun could do was let the sincerity of his apology ease across the link between them, trying his best to stifle the sensation of dancing sparks across his skin where Chanyeol’s breath brushed against him. 

Time disappeared like the fading light outside the broken window, but Baekhyun’s fingers never loosened their grip, couldn’t loosen their grip. It was Chanyeol that finally let go, releasing his hold on Baekhyun’s shoulders and taking his solid warmth with it. There was a tug across their bond at the motion, a sensation of somehow being pulled back together, and Baekhyun flushed with embarrassment at his own neediness. 

“We should both get some sleep,” Chanyeol said, and his face almost looked red in the dimness of their apartment. “We can sort the rest of this out in the morning. With clear heads.”

“Yeah.” Baekhyun’s head was far from clear, but the fuzziness had nothing to do with sleep deprivation and everything to do with Chanyeol’s soft smile. “Tomorrow.”

He watched Chanyeol’s eyes flicker to the window, and the frown that tugged the corners of his mouth down at the sight. Baekhyun could sense worry across the bond again, the emotion sour enough to make him step back. He made a coward’s retreat out of the living room to the safety of his bedroom before Chanyeol could say anything else.

~

Chanyeol pushed through the door of Baekhyun’s bedroom without knocking, expecting his meister to be curled beneath the covers of his bed already. It was an effort to not turn directly on his heel and exit when he saw that Baekhyun was shirtless and rifling through his dresser, clearly in the middle of preparing for bed. And perplexingly half-naked.

Baekhyun startled slightly before turning back to his clothes, seeming intent to avoid Chanyeol’s gaze. The weapon found his stare drifting downwards instead to slide along Baekhyun’s slender neck, across the sharp lines of his collarbones before clinging to the wiry muscles of his upper arms-

“What’s up?” It may have been Chanyeol’s imagination, but Baekhyun’s voice sounded slightly breathless as he pulled on the oversized T-shirt he drew from his dresser with more haste than necessary. Something in his stomach clenched when he realized the too-large shirt was one of his own, a piece of clothing he had thought he lost in the laundry. It dwarfed Baekhyun’s slim figure, falling low enough that it covered the edges of Baekhyun’s shorts and left his legs deceptively exposed. His black hair was sticking up from where the T-shirt had mussed it and Chanyeol wanted to pet it back down. Or maybe tangle his fingers through it and _pull_.

“I’m sleeping here tonight.” Chanyeol hoped his voice sounded normal to Baekhyun’s ears, or at least that the other boy couldn’t read the tightness in it as desire.

“What for?” Baekhyun was standing very still, fingers buried in the hem of his sleep shirt.

It had been a long time since the two slept in the same bed together, mostly because Chanyeol started to feel self-conscious in the way only a teenage boy could be about his attraction to his meister by age fourteen. By the time he’d moved past this stage of denial, Baekhyun had stopped trying slip in beneath his covers. It was something he’d always regretted from his awkward early teenage years, and not just because it meant he no longer had a feasible reason to sleep next to Baekhyun other than their late nights on their shared couch. He knew Baekhyun was the type of person that thrived from human contact, who reached for people around him unconsciously. And the older boy had taken Chanyeol’s rejection as an indication that he needed to try and stifle this side of him.

“I want to be close by in case something happens again. In the night.”

“There’s no need,” Baekhyun said, turning away to climb under his covers. “I handled the situation just fine without you, didn’t I?”

Chanyeol knew the meister didn’t mean it as an insult but something about the flippant remark brought his insecurities back to the surface in a sudden swell of self-doubt. Baekhyun must have felt it too, across the bond, because he froze.

“I didn’t mean it like- I was trying to-” his meister floundered.

Chanyeol exhaled heavily. “I know. But now that you’ve insulted me, at least humor me to make amends.”

Baekhyun’s collapsed on his side onto the mattress, slamming his head into his pillow with more force than necessary so Chanyeol couldn't see his face.

“If you don’t, I’ll hold a grudge,” Chanyeol warned.

“I left you plenty of room, didn’t I?”

Chanyeol blinked. Baekhyun was facing away from him, but there was a strange kind of guardedness filtering across their link with the invitation. And beneath it, the faintest brushings of hope.

He couldn’t help the smile that crept across his face as he looked down at the other boy. It took only a moment for him to kick off his slippers and slide in next to his meister, the motion unfamiliar enough to make him giddy. There was nothing foreign about Baekhyun’s bedroom, and even less about Baekhyun himself. And yet this felt like new territory, dangerous territory. Chanyeol stared at the back of Baekhyun’s head until the meister reached over to switch his bedside lamp off. They were left under a blanket of darkness and Baekhyun’s soft, laundry-detergent scent.

The dark seemed to relax Baekhyun somehow. Despite his lack of response, Chanyeol could feel the thrum of happiness emanating from his meister - an uninhibited contentment he wasn’t used to sensing from the other boy. With the sensation came another feeling, something Chanyeol occasionally felt slip through the bond but was never able to pin it to a particular emotional state of Baekhyun’s. It felt warm and exciting and nervous and more often than not Chanyeol thought it was his own feelings for Baekhyun getting mixed up in the link between them.

He sighed and turned on his side, away from the shape of Baekhyun’s blanket-covered silhouette. Not long after, he felt Baekhyun shift towards him. First, a small foot brushed against the back of his calf, then a hand came up to tentatively grip the back of his shirt before sliding all the way across his waist to rest against his stomach. Chanyeol’s breath hitched as he felt Baekhyun’s warmth against his back, not quite touching him but close enough for his body heat to reach him.

“Are you asleep?” Chanyeol whispered.

It was quiet for a long time, just the sound of their breath falling between them. 

Then: “No.”

The places where Baekhyun’s skin brushed against his own seemed to feel infinitely more sensitive then, as if a current was running between their bodies. It wasn’t like the sensation of an active resonance link, but somehow he felt that their natural resonance amplified it in way that made Chanyeol want to wrap his arms around Baekhyun and push him back against the mattress.

“Is this okay?” Baekhyun’s voice was a hoarse whisper from behind him, and he shuddered at the sound. 

“It’s okay.”

“Chanyeol?”

“Hmm?” The low rumble of his own voice sounded sleepier than he felt.

The quiet between them was soft, contemplative. In the clarity of that stillness, Chanyeol realized he felt more at home here than when he’d hugged his own sister on the streets of his hometown.

“Thank you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while! I can't make any promises on frequent or consistent updates but I am still working on this fic, it's just been crazy busy irl for me. Thanks again for the support~

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to ask about any confusion you may have about the Soul Eater universe, I’d be more than happy to clear things up. I did take some artistic liberties with world-building because the manga and anime have some major inconsistencies. In any case, I had way more fun writing this than I have any right to, so hopefully this wasn’t too outlandish.


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